White House counselor Kellyanne Conway on Tuesday asked a reporter his ethnicity in response to a question about President Trump’s “go back” comments directed at a group of nonwhite Democratic congresswomen.
Andrew Feinberg, a White House reporter for Breakfast Media, asked the Trump adviser what country the president was referring to when he said that the female lawmakers should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
“If the president was not telling these four congresswomen to return to their supposed countries of origin, to which countries was he referring?” Feinberg asked during a press gaggle in the White House driveway.{mosads}
“What’s your ethnicity?” Conway asked.
“Why is that relevant?” Feinberg responded.
Conway said her own relatives were from Ireland and Italy.
“My own ethnicity is not relevant to the question I’m asking you,” Feinberg reiterated, but Conway disagreed.
“No, no. It is,” the Trump spokesperson said. “Because you’re asking about — he said ‘originally.’ He said ‘originally from.’ And you know everything he has said since and to have a full conversation.”
“So are you saying that the president was telling a Palestinian American to go back to the Middle East, to occupied territories?” he asked.
Conway said the president has already commented on this manner and pointed to his doubling down in a series of additional tweets.
“He is tired, a lot of us are sick and tired of America coming last,” Conway fired back. “To people who swore an oath of office. Sick and tired of our military being denigrated. Sick and tired of the Customs and Border Protection people I was with — who are overwhelming Hispanic, by the way, in McAllen, Texas.”
Conway said border officials are being harassed online by “a bunch of Hollywood D-listers who have nothing else to do but sit on their asses on Twitter all day.”
The president sparked outrage on Sunday morning when he tweeted that unidentified progressive congresswomen “who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe” should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
Trump did not identify which lawmakers he was referring to, but the comments were widely interpreted as targeting Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.).
All four are U.S. citizens, and only Omar, who came to the U.S. as a refugee from Somalia, was born outside the U.S.
Feinberg took to Twitter after the altercation and said that it appeared Trump was telling the progressive women to go back to their countries of ancestral origin.
“She responded by asking me where my ancestors came from, thereby confirming what he meant,” the reporter wrote.
Feinberg added that his ethnicity is from a “mix” of different countries, including Poland and Lithuania.
“In response to my question, @KellyannePolls inadvertently confirmed that @realDonaldTrump was telling @IlhanMN, @RashidaTlaib, @AOC, @AyannaPressley to return to Somalia, Gaza, Puerto Rico, and somewhere in Africa,” he wrote.
Trump on Tuesday insisted that he does not have a “racist bone” in his body, hours before the House is set to vote on a resolution condemning the comments as racist.
The text of the measure “strongly condemns President Donald Trump’s racist comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color by saying that our fellow Americans who are immigrants, and those who may look to the President like immigrants, should ‘go back’ to other countries.”