Piers Morgan slams Trump for 'racist rhetoric', says AOC and The Squad are as American as the president
Hours after widespread outrage over Trump's racist tweets about four Democratic congresswomen, British journalist Piers Morgan slammed the Republican's tweets as"extraordinarily offensive" and called his language "disgusting."
The television presenter also asked President Donald Trump to apologize to these women, known in Washington as 'The Squad', writing: "You owe these four American women an apology, Mr President."
Trump, on Sunday, took to Twitter to slam the four Congresswomen—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts—and asked them to "go back" to their own countries.
"So interesting to see 'Progressive Democrat Congresswomen' who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all) now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!" Trump wrote in his tweets.
The president made the comments despite knowing that all four Congresswomen are American citizens, AOC was born in the Bronx to parents of Puerto Rican descent, Pressley, who is black, was born in Cincinnati and raised in Chicago, Tlaib was born in Detroit to Palestinian immigrants, and Omar, who is a refugee from Somalia, was granted American citizenship at the age of 17.
Morgan, in his piece, wrote that "all four of them are legal U.S. citizens. In other words, they’re all Americans."
He also pointed out that if we consider parental lineage, Trump's own grandfather was a migrant in American from Germany: "In fact, they’re as American, and as entitled to live in America, as Donald Trump. Lest we forget, Trump’s own grandfather Friedrich Trump was born in Germany and emigrated to the U.S. as a teenager and his mother is Scottish. That’s how the Trumps came to be in America, and that’s how Donald was able to become President of the United States."
The television presenter added that, if Trump were to be asked, he would tell you that he's the "most American of any Americans you've ever met," however when you ask him about four Congresswomen, you are bound to get a very different answer from him.
Morgan, in his piece, also slammed the four Congresswomen, calling them "super-woke liberals", for "spew(ing) a ferociously politically correct agenda" which he finds "extremely irritating," and added that Trump's anger directed towards these women was "driven by their undeniable visceral hatred of everything he says and does."
"AOC, unofficial leader of The Squad, regularly spouts outrageous virtue-signalling socialist claptrap and viciously partisan anti-Trump abuse that makes my skin crawl," Morgan wrote in the Daily Mail. "But here’s the thing: she, like the other three Congresswomen, enjoys an absolute right to do so under the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution because she’s an American citizen. That’s the real power of a great democracy: freedom to say what you want, when you want, about what you want. So when President Trump tells them all to ‘go back’ to ‘places from which they came’, he’s inferring that somehow they’re not real Americans, or certainly not as American as he is. And that, whichever way you try to spin it, is a racist sentiment."
Morgan, at one instance, also appeared to defend Trump saying he did not believe the president was a racist but was"far too casual with his language, and says stuff that has unsavory racist overtones—like his ‘Mexico.. is bringing their rapists’ jibe back in 2015 and his ‘good people on both sides’ nonsense when white supremacists marched in Charlottesville."
The 'Good Morning Britain' host added that he could see the point Trump was "clumsily trying to make" but the president did not consider how to present those points "careless, insensitive, racist-sounding phraseology that will inevitably fuel and empower genuine racists."
Morgan said that such phraseology from the president was "unacceptable" and his language was "disgusting," adding that the tweets were "self-defeating" from a political standpoint.
"Now, just when there seemed to be a potentially election-ruinous chasm developing between the old and new guard of the Democrats, with alleged racism at the heart of it, Trump’s managed to reunite them against their preferred common enemy: him. So this was very bad politics. But worse than that, it was very bad rhetoric. In fact, let’s call it exactly what it was: very bad racist rhetoric," he wrote.