AAPI clap back against Trump's racist tweet

SCREEN CAPTURE / NBC

Donald Trump attacked the four congresswomen, above, from left: Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. They had a press conference Monday.

Donald Trump's racist tweet attacking four Congress of color drew a firestorm of criticism and new accusations of racism. One congressmember called him a "racist ass."
Early Sunday morning, Trump posted the following tweets. Although he didn't mention them by name, he was addressing the strong attacks against his policies from Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

Trump also claimed that the four Democrats "came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe." Three of the four congresswomen were born in the U.S. Only Omar was born in a foreign country and she was naturalized in her teens.

Perhaps one of the strongest condemnations of Trump didn't come from members of the Democratic Party but from the husband of Trump advisor Kelly Anne Conway.

To George Conway, who is a Filipino American, Trump's tweet against four freshman Congressmembers - telling the women of color to go back where they came from, was personal.

In a Washington Post op-ed, Conway recalled an incident when he was a child, "I remember the incident well, but it never bothered me all that much. Nor did racial slurs, which, thankfully, were rare. None of it was troublesome, to my mind, because most Americans weren’t like that," Conway wrote before noting how "naive a child could be."

He listed some of the things Trump said or instigated that led up to the Sunday morning tweet that elicited an avalanche of condemnation from Democrats and mostly silence from Republicans.

Conway wrote further that "no matter how much I found [Trump] ultimately unfit, I still gave him the benefit of the doubt about being a racist."

"What’s at stake now is more important than judges or tax cuts or regulations or any policy issue of the day," Conway concluded. "What’s at stake are the nation’s ideals, its very soul."

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

Members of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus also had strong reactions against Trump's tweet. Rep. Ted Lieu of California held nothing . back in his interview on MSNBC, calling Trump a "racist ass."

"Far too many in our community have been stereotyped as foreigners and told to ‘go back to where they came from’ regardless of how long their families have lived in the United States,” said Rep. Judy Chu in an interview with HuffPost.

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