Trump: Pelosi's not a racist and AOC is being "very disrespectful" to her

This is King Troll at his best. Good luck to House Dems in trying to figure out whom they should side with now that the most hated Republican in the country has joined Team Nancy.

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Trump told reporters outside the White House that Ocasio-Cortez is “being very disrespectful to somebody who’s been there a long time.”

Ocasio-Cortez “should treat Nancy Pelosi with respect,” he added.

The president added that Pelosi is “not a racist,” though Ocasio-Cortez said Thursday that the Speaker is “absolutely not” racist. The progressive freshman lawmaker accused Pelosi of “singling out … newly elected women of color” for criticism, continuing a feud that has highlighted divides within the party.

I don’t know if he’s being strategic there or just giving his honest (and correct) opinion but Team AOC will inevitably try to hold Trump’s endorsement against Pelosi. Which means another day of civil war.

Which means another day of fun for all of us.

Trump’s endorsement of Pelosi in the spat with AOC might not be the newsiest one out there today. This one’s more interesting:

During an appearance on the New York-based radio show “The Breakfast Club,” [Kamala] Harris was asked about Ocasio-Cortez’s assertion in a Washington Post interview that Pelosi had been “just outright disrespectful” with “the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.”

“That’s not my experience with Nancy Pelosi,” said Harris, a Democratic presidential primary hopeful. “And I’ve known her and worked with her for years. I’ve known her to be very respectful of women of color and very supportive of them.

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What’s Harris’s angle there? She’s competing for progressive votes in the presidential primary; siding with Pelosi against Ocasio-Cortez isn’t going to help her with that. But (a) Harris is banking big on California to hand her a win and Pelosi has a lot of friends in California and (b) as Ed noted earlier, black Democrats in Congress seem firmly Team Nancy in this dispute. Harris is eager to pile up endorsements from black legislators in hopes of winning over black voters from Biden. If the Congressional Black Caucus is siding with Pelosi then Harris is siding with Pelosi.

Although … why is the Congressional Black Caucus siding with Pelosi? They’re pretty progressive, as Ed noted! You would think they’d at least be ambivalent between Nancy and Ocasio-Cortez, particularly when the latter’s alleging bias against minorities by political leaders. Instead some of the rhetoric being aimed at AOC by Pelosi’s allies is — well, just read this. Hoo boy.

“She’s only a woman of color when it’s convenient. None of the things she’s fought for aligned with communities of color and her group is funded only by elitist white liberals; she’s a puppet,” the top Democratic aide told The Hill in a phone call.

The aide then texted an image of a Goomba puppet from the Super Mario Bros. video game.

“I can’t tell you how pissed off people are” about the Justice Democrats, the aide added. “All these CBC members feel like they are under siege. But it’s offensive that these elitist white liberals feel like they can undermine the foundation of our party,” African American voters.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, tool of the white man. It’s absolutely true, though, that the vanguard of woke leftism is composed mainly of white intellectuals, not working-class people of color. And it’s also true, per the last sentence in that excerpt, that some black Democrats in Congress (and many white Democrats too) resent that the Justice Democrats PAC that backs AOC is also angling to recruit primary challengers to them. Rep. Lacy Clay went as far as to compare Justice Democrats to “Russian trolls of 2016” in working to divide the party. Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama, who’s black and part of the centrist New Democrat Coalition, scolded them by reminding them that she experienced segregation firsthand as a kid and doesn’t need any lectures from the left about what’s good for women of color.

On top of all that, many black legislators have been friendly with Pelosi for decades. If AOC was planning to start flinging sh*t at Pelosi over racism, it would have behooved her to invest more time making friends with senior minority leaders in her caucus and, for starters, to ask the Justice Democrats to keep their hands off of primaries in seats held by black incumbents. Instead she went in there with a storm-the-ramparts-change-the-world attitude, which the 20 percent of the party that’s hard-left loves and which everyone else finds alienating. Although I doubt she cares: Like any ideologue with a safe seat whose main avenue for influencing their party is media, not legislation, it’s good for her to be treated as a pariah by her leadership. Saints are always shunned for their virtue by the pharisees around them. She’ll wear their scorn like a halo to impress populist dummies.

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