Trump news: AOC, Ilhan Omar, Pressley and Tlaib slam 'hateful actions' of 'racist, xenophobic' president
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Your support makes all the difference.Donald Trump began the week embroiled in a racism row after attempting to exploit divisions among the opposition by telling young progressive congresswomen like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”, demanding an apology from the victims in his latest round of tweets.
Despite boasting of a 94 per cent approval rating among Republicans, the president found himself lagging behind Democratic 2020 challengers Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in a new poll conducted for NBC News/Wall Street Journal.
As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents began mass deportations raids on at least 10 American cities, Mr Trump also hit out at media coverage of vice president Mike Pence's visit to a border detention centre in McAllen, Texas, on Friday, insisting the facility in question was “well run and clean” despite evidence to the contrary.
During a press conference, Ms Ocasio-Cortez, Ms Omar, and their colleagues Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib all denounced the president's attacks on them, which he doubled down on Monday afternoon at the White House.
Ms Ocasio-Cortez, finishing up her remarks, called the president "weak", and said he focuses on personal attacks because he cannot debate issues.
"Weak minds and leaders challenge loyalty to our country in order to avoid challenging and debating the policy," Ms Ocasio-Cortez said.
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Ms Ocasio-Cortez is now saying she is "not surprised" by the various ways that Donald Trump is working as president.
She says the she and her colleagues are "focused".
"We'll stay focused on our vision, and we won't get caught slippin', because all of this is a distraction," Ms Ocasio-Cortez says.
Ms Pressley says that she and her colleagues have received support since Mr Trump's "hateful rhetoric". She notes that she is not surprised.
"He is, if nothing else, predictable," she says, before noting that she and her colleagues are focused on "hateful policies" of the president.
Ms Omar is saying that people who are brown and black have heard they are affiliated with terrorists, as Mr Trump has said.
"I will not dignify it with an answer because I know that every single islamophobe, every single person who is hateful, who is driven by an ideology of othering as this president is rejoices in us responding to that and us defending ourselves," she says.
Ms Omar says that "every single statement" that she and her colleagues makes is out of "extreme love" for the people in the United States.
"For him to condemn us and to say we are unAmerican for wanting to work hard to make this country be the country we all deserve to live in, it's complete hypocrisy," Ms Omar said, noting that Mr Trump ran his 2016 campaign saying that the US was broken and needed to be fixed.
"Weak minds and leaders challenge loyalty to our country in order to avoid challenging and debating the policy," Ms Ocasio-Cortez said.
"This president does not know how to defend his policies, so what he does is he attacks us personally, and that is what it is all about. He cant look a child in the face and he can't look Americans in the face and justify why this country is throwing them into cages," Ms Ocasio-Cortez said.
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