Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) on Monday said President Trump should delete his tweets telling four Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” to their home countries, calling his rhetoric “way over the line.”
“I disagree strongly with many of the views and comments of some of the far-left members of the House Democratic Caucus … but the President’s tweet that some Members of Congress should go back to the ‘places from which they came’ was way over the line, and he should take that down,” Collins said in a statement.
Collins, who is up for reelection in a state won by Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016, is the first Republican lawmaker to explicitly call for Trump to delete his tweets from Sunday.
Though Republicans have largely remained silent about Trump’s tweets, there is growing pushback from some members of the party.{mosads}
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a close ally of Trump’s, urged the president to avoid personal attacks, calling on him to focus on criticizing Democratic policies instead. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) called Trump’s tweets “wrong,” adding that the citizenship of the four congresswomen is “as valid as mine.”
Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) has gone further than any other GOP lawmaker so far, describing the Trump tweet as “racist and xenophobic.”
Trump sparked fierce and widespread backlash — largely from Democrats — on Sunday when he targeted a group of unidentified progressive congresswomen “who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe.”
In the tweets, which appeared to be directed at Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), the president suggested they “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
All four have been outspoken critics of the Trump administration, and Omar and Tlaib in particular have questioned the U.S.-Israel relationship, prompting pushback from Republicans. All four are U.S. citizens and only Omar was born outside the United States.
Trump doubled down on his statement late Sunday, saying it was “sad” to see Democrats sticking up for the four women, who he argued used “disgusting language” and said “many terrible things” about the U.S. that “must not be allowed to go unchallenged.”