Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera attacked president Trump over his now-notorious “go back” tweets.
Rivera, who is ordinarily a Trump backer, said that he hopes Trump’s Sunday morning tweet blast targeting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and other progressive lawmakers of color are not a “glimpse into his soul.” Trump said that Ocasio-Cortez and other far-left women who call themselves “the squad’ should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested place[s] from which they came.”
“I just hope it isn’t a glimpse at his soul. I just hope that he doesn’t really believe that every person of color comes from someplace else,” Rivera said.
Trump has been widely condemned for the tweets, which momentarily unified the Democratic party after an ugly feud that erupted between “the squad” and Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) last week. However, many supporters of Trump say that “the squad” deserved to be called out for showing hatred for the United States and that Trump’s tweets were not about race, but rather the congresswomen’s anti-American policies and rhetoric.
Rivera disappointed
President Trump’s Sunday morning tweet storm reverberated through the political world and prompted a swift backlash from Democrats, who accused Trump of stoking racism and xenophobia. On Monday, Rivera told Fox’s Martha McCallum that he was “saddened” by Trump’s comments and had a similar assessment.
“I was really saddened by what he said invoking the language of racism and xenophobia in describing these four women I thought it was very unnecessary,” Rivera said. “The Democrats were doing a great job in destroying themselves and being divided and he united them gratuitously, I don’t know why he did it. I don’t know what he was thinking, it is unfortunate,” he continued.
President Trump doubled down on Monday and called on the four lawmakers, Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), to “apologize” for their anti-American “hate.” But Rivera, who has defended the president against media slander such as the Mueller hoax, said that Trump’s comments were “unfortunate” since they seem to corroborate what his enemies always say about him. Rivera called on Trump to apologize or else clarify the tweets.
“You know when I defend him I do so against all these gratuitous attacks in the media. He has the worst press of any president in modern history and yet he does things like this that leaves himself open to the criticism that he is exactly what the people who hate him say he is and I feel it’s very unfortunate,” Rivera said.
However, Rivera has broken with Trump before, for example, on the issue of family separations. Rivera told Sean Hannity last summer that “history will judge” Republicans for supporting the separation of immigrant families at the border.
Racist blunder?
Rivera’s assessment was shared by some on the right, who felt that the president had wantonly wasted political capital by unifying the Democrats with a racist attack. Only last week, the Democratic Party was split in two after Ocasio-Cortez accused Pelosi of racism for dismissing “the squad” amid an ongoing power struggle between Pelosi and the far left.
Trump’s tweets have arguably brought the Democrats together, at least momentarily, but the long-simmering divide between Pelosi and “the squad” certainly isn’t going anywhere. On Saturday, a day before Trump’s tweets, Omar told a crowd of progressive activists that the left plans to “grab power” from party leadership.
The president has insisted that his tweets were not racist — and many of his supporters seem to agree that Trump’s critics are missing the bigger picture. In follow-up comments, Trump has repeatedly accused “the squad” of hating their country and claimed that his remarks forced the Democrats to own their extremism. Trump’s efforts to make “the squad” the face of the Democratic party, with everything that entails — socialism, open borders, impeachment derangement — might actually work: a leaked internal Democrat poll found that Ocasio-Cortez and Omar are deeply unpopular.
While it looks like some fair weather friends of Trump have abandoned him, his more devoted supporters say that the president is right about “the squad.” One America News reporter Emerald Robinson put it this way: “Folks, “‘ideology’ and ‘race’ are two different things. President Trump is pointing out the anti-American ideology of @IlhanMN. Her problem is not that she’s a ‘woman of color’ but that she’s a woman of ISIS and Al Qaeda.”
Bigotry in all its forms is wrong, period. But it is possible to criticize Trump’s tweets and also recognize that a wider point is true: that these particular lawmakers, irrespective of their identity, have shown prejudice towards the United States.
On Monday, the four Democratic congresswomen blasted Trump at a press conference and called for his impeachment. Omar refused to condemn al-Qaeda and also would not denounce a deadly leftist terrorist attack on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Washington state that left an Antifa terrorist dead this weekend.
Did Trump’s tweets help, or hurt him? While Trump’s tweets may have “unified” the Dems, Pelosi shouldn’t want “the squad” to be in the forefront of voters’ minds when they go to the polls. Her awareness of that reality has been made abundantly clear by her own comments on this radical group of four.
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