Kellyanne Conway to reporter who asked which countries the Squad should go back to: "What's your ethnicity?"

That’ll make a fine alternate slogan for the iconic MAGA hat in Trump’s campaign store next year.

It’s also an amazing complement to her husband’s op-ed in WaPo today unloading on Trump for his tweets about the Squad:

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[H]ow naive an adult could be. The birther imaginings about Barack Obama? Just a silly conspiracy theory, latched onto by an attention seeker who has a peculiar penchant for them. The “Mexican” Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel incident? Asinine, inappropriate, a terrible attack on the judiciary by an egocentric man who imagined that the judge didn’t like him. The white supremacists’ march in Charlottesville? The president’s comments were absolutely idiotic, but he couldn’t possibly have been referring to those self-described Nazis as “good people”; in his sloppy, inarticulate way, he was referring to both sides of the debate over Civil War statues, and venting his anger about being criticized.

No, I thought, President Trump was boorish, dim-witted, inarticulate, incoherent, narcissistic and insensitive. He’s a pathetic bully but an equal-opportunity bully — in his uniquely crass and crude manner, he’ll attack anyone he thinks is critical of him. No matter how much I found him ultimately unfit, I still gave him the benefit of the doubt about being a racist. No matter how much I came to dislike him, I didn’t want to think that the president of the United States is a racial bigot.

But Sunday left no doubt. Naivete, resentment and outright racism, roiled in a toxic mix, have given us a racist president.

The title of the piece was short and to the point: “Trump is a racist president.” WaPo should run a rebuttal from Kellyanne, as a point/counterpoint. Title: “What’s your ethnicity?”

No no. In fairness to her, I don’t think she meant that line in her exchange with the reporter the way it came off in the clip below. She’s already tried to clarify:

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The reporter, Andrew Feinberg, is Jewish but said afterward that he doesn’t think Conway was being anti-semitism. Of course she wasn’t. She was trying to make the point rhetorically that almost all American families come from somewhere else when you go back far enough and that that’s all Trump meant when he invited Ilhan Omar et al. to return to where they came from “originally.” He wasn’t singling them out. Asking Feinberg “What’s your ethnicity?” was just a way to set that point up by using the reporter’s own background as example.

But it’s unconvincing. No one seriously believes that Feinberg or Bernie Sanders or some more generic “American-looking” person would have gotten the “go back where you came from” treatment from Trump. Omar got it because she’s Muslim, wears a headscarf, speaks with an accent (slightly), and famously was a refugee — that is, she herself comes from abroad, not just her family. She’s as foreign as an American politician gets. Whether Trump thought all members of the Squad were also foreign-born or whether he was lumping them in together because they’re all minorities and function as a bloc in the House, only he knows. But Kellyanne’s kidding herself if she means to imply that all ethnicities are equally likely to draw a presidential invitation to head on home and clean up your ancestral mess.

I mean, he doesn’t think all foreign countries are “sh*thole countries,” right? “Why do we need more Haitians?” he reportedly asked at a White House meeting last year, wondering why we couldn’t have more Norwegian and Asian immigrants instead. Only some people get the “What’s your ethnicity?” treatment from POTUS, despite Kellyanne’s best efforts here.

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I will say, though, that she recovers well after the initial stumble, segueing into a righteous tirade about how Democrats, or at least the Squad, seem to put Americans second on the topic of immigration. At best, progressives like AOC and Omar seem to think illegal immigrants should be treated no differently — in any way — than American citizens. How come? Does the rest of the party see no distinction between citizens and migrants? That’ll be a fruitful line of inquiry for the GOP next year, especially one led by a guy with “America First” as his motto.

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Jazz Shaw 7:20 PM | March 18, 2024
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