James Hohmann of the Washington Post reports on the House Democrats’ plan to quote Ronald Reagan to rebuke Trump’s racism and xenophobia:

 

THE BIG IDEA: The four-page resolution of disapproval that the House will take up this week to condemn President Trump’s racist tweetstorm quotes at length from Ronald Reagan’s final speech in the White House.

“This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness: We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people – our strength – from every country and every corner of the world,” Reagan said in January 1989. “And, by doing so, we continuously renew and enrich our nation. … Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

Thirty years later, the man who now occupies the White House tweeted that four minority lawmakers – three of whom were born in the United States – should “go back” to “the crime infested places from which they came.” A reporter asked Trump on Monday, “Does it concern you that many people find that tweet racist?”

“It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me,” the president replied, adding that the four women “hate our country.”

House Republican leadership aides expect few of their members to defect from Trump to support the resolution of disapproval, which could come up for a vote as soon as today. It also says that Trump’s tweets “have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.”

Trump’s targets held a news conference at the Capitol last night to respond to the president’s comments. Reps. Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.) each took turns speaking. Pressley was born in Cincinnati, Tlaib was born in Detroit, and Ocasio-Cortez was born in New York. Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia; her family fled the country amid civil war when she was a child, and she became a U.S. citizen as a teenager.

Ocasio-Cortez, who is of Puerto Rican descent, remembered when she was a girl and her dad brought her to the Reflecting Pool on the Mall. He told her to look around. Then he told her that the monuments she saw, and the nation they represented, belonged to her just as much as anyone else. “I want to tell children across this country,” the congresswoman said last night, “no matter what the president says, this country belongs to you, and it belongs to everyone.”

Hohmann writes that Trump’s racist tweets are intended to solidify the position of the Republican Party as the party of angry white men. He is betting that White Nationalism is a strong suit for 2020:

“Trump is proposing a giant swap: Republicans can no longer count on suburban women and we will continue to lose college-educated men and women, while we increasingly pick up working white Americans without college degrees,” said Ari Fleischer, who was a White House press secretary for President George W. Bush and who has spoken with Trump campaign advisers about their strategy for increasing turnout. “Nobody knows who will come out ahead in the swap,” he told Scherer. “That’s what the campaign will tell us.”

Teresa Hanafin, who writes the daily “Fast Forward” for the Boston Globe, wrote:

Trump’s new tack is that anyone who dares to criticize him and his policies hates America and should leave. That’s not only a scary echo of the “love it or leave it” chant that conservatives screamed at those protesting the Vietnam War; it’s also quite hypocritical.

Remember his “American Carnage” inauguration speech? It was a dark, angry, harsh, and vengeful criticism of the country, a nation he depicted as littered with starving, uneducated people wandering among rusted-out factories with needles hanging out of their arms and beset by roving gangs of criminals. No wonder that when he finished, former president George W. Bush, sitting nearby, whispered, “That was some weird s—!”

So the question is, if Trump hated the country so much, why didn’t he leave? I hear Siberia is lovely this time of year.