Republican Elaine Chao speaks out against Trump racist insults

Republican stalwart Elaine Chao and her husband, Sen. Mitch McConnell.

It took a long time, but finally, Elaine Chao publicly responded to Donald Trump's racist taunts.

Chao, who was Secretary of Transportation on Trump's Cabinet, resigned from her post after the Jan. 6 insurrection, which deeply troubled her. At the time, she said, "it has deeply troubled me in a way that I simply cannot set aside." 

Not surprisingly, that didn't sit well with Trump. It opened the door for Trump's not-so-subtle slurs, insulting Chao as “Coco Chow” or Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell’s “China-loving wife.”

“When I was young, some people deliberately misspelled or mispronounced my name. Asian Americans have worked hard to change that experience for the next generation,” Chao told Politico in a statement.

“He doesn’t seem to understand that, which says a whole lot more about him than it will ever say about Asian Americans.”

Until this week, Chao, a loyal Republican, refused to criticize Trump.

The last straw apparently was Trump's suggestion that his former Transportation Secretary may have been responsible for President Joe Biden bringing classified documents with him to his post-vice presidency office in D.C.’s Chinatown neighborhood.

Chao's response comes after 11 Asian American elderly were killed in a mass shooting in Monterey Park, California and another 66-year old Asian American man fatally shot seven agricultural workers in Half Moon Bay. The deadly tragedies occur in a seemingly never-ending attacks against Asian Americans, which many have partially attributed to Trump's anti-Chinese slurs in blaming China for COVID-19 and reinforced his beliefs by calling the pandemic the "Kung Flu" or "China Flu."

Trump's spokesperson, Steven Cheung, told Insider: "People should stop feigning outrage and engaging in controversies that exist only in their heads."

Cheung also repeated Trump's rhetoric about Chao.

"What's actually concerning is her family's deeply troubling ties to Communist China, which has undermined American economic and national security," Cheung told Politico.

Chao immigrated to the US when she was a child from Taiwan. Her family founded the Foremost Group, a large shipping company based in New York. She went on to graduate from Harvard Business School and served in multiple Republican administrations, and was the first Asian American woman in a presidential Cabinet as Labor secretary for George W. Bush and Transportation secretary for Trump.

Trump's anti-China rhetoric also makes it difficult for the Republican Party trying to woo increasingly influential Asian American voters from the Democrats. The two Asian American Republicans in Congress, Young Kim and Michelle Steel, both representing Southern California districts, remain silent on Trump's slurs.  In the 2020 Presidential election, the AAPI Republican PAC did not endorse Trump. 

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