Supporters at President Trump’s campaign rally on Wednesday chanted “send her back” about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) after the president launched into a diatribe against the first-term lawmaker and Somali refugee.
Trump tore into Omar early on in his rally in Greenville, N.C., a continuation of his days-long attacks against her and three other progressive minority congresswomen. The crowd raucously booed Omar at the first mention of her name.{mosads}
The president went on to accuse Omar of demeaning U.S. service members and minimizing the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“She looks down with contempt on the hard-working Americans saying that ignorance is pervasive in many parts of this country,” Trump said.
The crowd then broke into a chant of “send her back” in reference to Omar, who came to the U.S. as a Somali refugee as child.
The president has in recent days targeted Omar and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), claiming the lawmakers “hate our country” and suggesting they should leave rather than complain about the government.
He sparked an uproar on Sunday morning when he tweeted that 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.”
All four are U.S. citizens, and only Omar was born outside the U.S.
The president has ratcheted up his criticisms even as Democrats and some Republicans alike condemned his original tweets as racist. The House voted Tuesday to condemn Trump over the tweets.
The crowd reacted negatively at the first mention of Omar’s name, and the furor intensified after a protester appeared to cause a scene.
“He goes home to mommy now and he gets reprimanded,” Trump said of the demonstrator as they were escorted out.
The president went on to reference a years-old video clip in which Omar lightheartedly recounted the tone of voice a professor would use to talk about al Qaeda. The clip resurfaced in a Fox News report earlier this year.
Trump also alluded to Omar’s comments about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which some perceived as minimizing the event.
“CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something, and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties,” Omar said earlier this year in a speech to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Omar responded to the chants on Twitter roughly an hour later by quoting the poem “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou.
Updated at 9:09 p.m.