Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., disputed President Trump’s account of his Wednesday night rally in North Carolina, claiming that he “relished” the audience’s chantsabout sending Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., back to her native country.
“He kind of presided over the situation, he relished it, he took it in,” she said at a town hall on immigration in her New York City district Saturday. When a reporter asked her whether she believed Trump had led the crowd on, Ocasio-Cortez replied: “He absolutely did.”
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She also pushed back on Trump’s claim that he spoke up to stop the chants “immediately.” “Roll the tape, he didn’t,” she said. The chant continued for at least 10 seconds before the president said anything.
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But according to Ocasio-Cortez, a “key part” of Trump rousing his base involved allowing Neo-Nazis to go “unchecked.” She went on to claim that Trump’s response to the chants put “millions of Americans” in danger and showed that he no longer wanted to be the president of the United States.
“What he told this country is that he doesn’t want to be president anymore because he wants to pick and choose who he is a president to — and that’s not a president,” she said.
“Once you start telling American citizens to ‘go back to your own countries,’ this tells you that this President’s policies are not about immigration, it’s about ethnicity and racism,” Ocasio-Cortez went on to applause from the town hall crowd. “And his biggest mistake is that he said the quiet part loud. That was his biggest mistake because we know that he’s been thinking this the entire time.” – READ MORE