President Trump’s Twitter output has been so prodigious of late — and so monotonously repetitious with its recurrent restatements of the same denouncements of Democrats and the Mueller report, the same cries of “No Obstruction, No Collusion” — that it’s easy to miss the outliers in the torrent of tweets, the ones that fall outside the standard daily templates.
Today, the president inserted a post in between his unearned brags about the U.S. economy, his attacks on Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, and his misleading defense of his China tariff policy costing Americans millions in a form of regressive taxation.
Democrat Rep. Tlaib is being slammed for her horrible and highly insensitive statement on the Holocaust. She obviously has tremendous hatred of Israel and the Jewish people. Can you imagine what would happen if I ever said what she said, and says?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 13, 2019
This lone tweet targeting Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) does fit into a recurrent category that Trump revisits frequently in his social media posts — Muslim bashing while hypocritically accusing his target of anti-Semitism — an audacious accusation from the man who maintains that neo-Nazis are “fine people” and keeps his dog whistle ever ready to inspire synagogue shootings with his racist rhetoric.
Congresswoman Ihan Omar (D-MN) is someone who has frequently been on the receiving end of the same sort of Islamophobic presidential attacks as Trump’s tweet excoriating her House colleague Representative Tlaib.
She saw the president’s post and felt compelled to answer Trump’s rhetorical question with an incendiary and accusatory comeback that demonstrated how she sees through the obvious political motivations and deeply divisive tactics that the bigoted baby of Pennsylvania Avenue is trying to employ.
You praised people at a neo-Nazi rally. We don't have to imagine.
This is another transparent attempt to sow division b/t minority communities and distract from your own criminal behavior by smearing a Muslim woman.
No one should fall for it this time. https://t.co/y0ggJT83oF
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) May 13, 2019
Calling out the president’s despicable hypocrisy, Representative Omar lets Trump know that his laughably barefaced schtick is way past its prime, warning anyone who may be tempted to allow themselves to be seduced by Trump’s siren song of religious, cultural, and political animosity to set aside their gullibility and reject the conman’s slithery carnival hucksterism.
With political attitudes polarized and hardened by two years of purposefully hateful and disruptive propaganda emanating from the Oval Office, Congresswoman Omar’s message is likely to only reach the already confirmed and dedicated opposition to President Trump.
Her essential message, however, needs to be heard and spread widely — that Trump’s unjustified and gratuitous attacks on his opponents are little more than a distractive smokescreen to cover up his now-entrenched criminal enterprise in the White House.
Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.
