Fox morning hosts applaud Trump’s racist tweets

News agencies and the media ignited as President Donald Trump, with his racist tweets, continued to turn the White House, into just that – The WHITE House.

That is, all but Fox News. They laughed as the president essentially told a black congresswoman to return to Africa.

This weekend, the president let loose a “tweetstorm” on the four rookie Democratic congresswomen of color – Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts – to “go back” to where “they came” from. All are American citizens and three of the four were born here.

While most of the reactions were immediate outrage, the mascots of his favorite cable news morning program Fox & Friends, also behaved as expected – by laughing while reading the Trump’s racist comments, calling them “very comedic” before claiming Trump was “making an important point.”

While host Griff Jenkins read the president’s tweets on air, co-host Jedediah Bila giggled, saying the president was, “feeling very comedic today.”

Again, Fox News laughed at a white man telling a black woman to go back to Africa.

Her fellow co-host Todd Piro, chimed in to criticize the congresswomen, calling them the “Instagram group,” while complaining that they need to realize that their words “have real-life consequences.”

Bila then applauded the president’s racist rants, claiming he was “making an important point.”

“He’s trying to say that the values that built this country, everything from securing the border and being a nation of laws to, you know, freedom of speech on college campuses, whatever issues you are talking about, a lot of times these are the issues that the left is trying to obstruct,” she declared. Watch below:

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If you really, really listen and read between the lines as to what Bila is really saying about these women of color, this is a coded message. Fifty years ago, “uppity” was the term for “shake up the system.”

It all began with Trump’s Sunday morning tweetstorm. He said it was “interesting” that progressive Democratic congresswomen were “loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States” how the government should be run, considering they “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe.”

He added, “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.” Three of the four women were born and raised in the United States, while Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is a U.S. citizen who moved from Somalia when she was a young child.

Ocasio-Cortez tweeted her reply, “the country I “come from,” & the country we all swear to, is the United States.”

Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts responded with her own tweet:

But that didn’t silence the president. He doubled down, calling for the congresswomen to apologize to the United States:

After being mentioned in Trump’s tweet, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, weighed in,

The Media was quick to respond. The New York Times’ Astead Herndon said it was important to “note the historic context of the ‘go back to’ insult is racial,” adding that people “tell black people to go ‘back to Africa’ whose families have lived here for generations.”

National security lawyer Bradley Moss, meanwhile, stated that Trump “came out and reminded us all this morning that he is a vile racist at his core,” blasting the “conservatives who sold their souls for judges and got him elected.”

“Anyone with a foreign sounding name and face who grew up in the US (like me) has heard this from the playground to contemporary life,” CNN’s Kyung Lah tweeted. “This morning it’s coming from ⁦@realDonaldTrump⁩.”

“When I call the president a racist, this is what I’m talking about,” Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said. “We must stand together for justice and dignity towards all.”

However, Trump’s Senator turned lapdog, Lindsey Graham, defended his statements, “We all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of communists,” Mr. Graham said on Fox News. “They hate Israel, they hate our own country.” But he also pushed back against the president’s suggestion that the women are not American.

“They are American citizens,” he said. “They won an election. Take on their policies. The bottom line here is this is a diverse country. Mr. President, you’re right about their policies. You’re right about where they will take the country. Just aim higher.”

We of course have seen this behavior of attacking people of color from Trump before. He was the one who raised the question in the media about Obama’s citizenship and ran much of his early campaign on that.

According to USA Today, all of Donald Trump’s grandparents, as well as his mother, were born in Europe. Melania Trump is from Slovenia.

In the current Congress, 13% of voting members are immigrants or children of immigrants, with family links to 37 countries, according to the Pew Research Center.

In fact, if all members of Congress were made to “go back” to the countries from which their families originated, as Trump suggested for the Democratic congresswomen, there would be four members left.

That’s the number of Native Americans currently serving.

On a personal note, my mother, an African American woman from Texas, who became a Doctor of Education was told several times to return to Africa. She was called a “girl” at 64 when an older white woman thought she was my daughter’s “mammy.”

I, as a biracial man from Philly, was told several times to return back to Africa. At 15, the white mother of my girlfriend told me that she didn’t hold me responsible that my parents made a mistake. Pretty funny, huh?

This is not the behavior of a president. These are the vile and divisive words of a racist.

Meanwhile, Fox & Friends laughs.

However, Fox, Mr. President, Reel 360 is not laughing. We’re not laughing at all.

In fact, we’re mad AF.

Source: Daily Beast, Twitter, USA Today, New York Times.

 
Contact Colin Costello at colin@reelchicago.com.