Today, Explained - "Send her back"

Episode Date: July 18, 2019

An ugly, racist week in America came to a head last night with a chant at a Trump rally. The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer says this is a defining moment for American democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's show comes to you courtesy of support from our good friends at the Illinois Office of Tourism. They'd just like to remind you that it is summer in the United States, people are traveling and you don't want to sleep on the great state of Illinois. They got Chicago, they got Wayne's World, they got that wine country, they got that Shawnee National Forest. They promise you that the feeling you'll have in Illinois is amazing. Are you up for amazing? Enjoy Illinois.com. Ellen Wilson, it's been an embarrassing week for the United States of America,

and you have been covering it. Indeed I have. Lucky me. Where does it begin, Ella? All of it? We have to go all the way back to last week, aka 10 years ago. So this all starts not so much even with Trump versus Democrats, but it starts with Democrats versus Democrats. Specifically, a group of progressive Democrats in the House. The so-called squad. The so-called squad. And this is Congresswomen Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.

And these are four freshmen, all women of color, who are definitely seen as being on kind of the furthest left wing of the party. They've been co-sponsoring a bunch of progressive legislation with some 2020 candidates, it should be noted. So they're kind of seen as this brain trust of the left in the House. But there was kind of this fight that erupted last week and, you know, even goes back a little further than that over this immigration border aid funding bill that passed the House. And progressives, including these four, it's a larger group of progressives, were arguing with Nancy Pelosi that they're needed in order to pass this funding. They wanted to make sure that there were sort of these these strict rules that the Trump administration had to follow for how they're treating migrants at the border. The squad wanted to make sure that they're treating migrants at the border. The squad wanted to make sure that they weren't funding harsh detention practices further.

Exactly. Yes. They wanted to make sure that if they sent this money, that there were some rules and some regulations attached to it, that they wanted to kind of put some teeth into it. That didn't happen. So there was a lot of fighting that broke out. And ultimately, Pelosi supports a funding bill that doesn't have so-called conditions, right? Yes, exactly. So this all kind of culminated in this kind of intra-party fighting over the last few weeks. And kind of the culmination of it was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, this guy named Sycott Chakrabarty, tweeted out something where he basically compared current moderate Democrats to Southern Democrats in the 1940s who enabled segregationist policies. So, you know, pretty charged language and language that

really pissed House leadership off and pissed off moderate Democrats. So there was this big meeting where Pelosi was basically like, hey, guys, like, don't tweet at each other. Like, let's just like if we have internal disagreements, let's talk about it. But let's not like wage this battle online. Yeah. Then last weekend, late on Friday night, the official House Democrats account tweeted about Saikat Chakrabarty, AOC's chief of staff, who is this guy and why is he explicitly singling out a Native American woman of color in reference to this other congresswoman and then said, like, keep her name out of your mouth. So it was like this direct attack on AOC's chief of staff. From the party. From the official Twitter account of House Democrats. Yeah. It was

nasty public infighting. And the president noticed. Yeah. So on Sunday, Trump unleashes this tweet storm where he says these four congresswomen, the squad, quote, originally came from countries whose governments are complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world. And then he says they should, quote, go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it's done. Important to note here that three out of the four congresswomen are from the United States, born and raised. Born in America. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was born in Somalia. Yes. And is a naturalized citizen.

And is a naturalized citizen. Yes. Legal, naturalized citizen. Which, of course, you know, a lot of people seized on this of like, you're talking about four women of color telling them to go back to where they came from. That is a racist trope. Yes, we people of color are familiar. Yes. Yeah. And it was kind of this weird thing where we're in his original like final tweet says he thinks that Nancy Pelosi would, quote, be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements. Pelosi immediately tweets out, you know, Trump's idea of making America great again is making America white again. And House Democrats waste no time in saying these tweets are racist, they're xenophobic, and soon after say we're going to release

a formal resolution condemning the president's language on the House floor. Poof, this fight between Democrats is now gone because they have something larger to focus on. And the president, instead of walking any of this back, just doubles down in like a press conference on Monday? Yeah, exactly. Like, why would he, you know, he's Donald Trump.

Why would he apologize for any of this stuff? He thinks he's right. It doesn't concern you that many people saw that tweet as racist and that white nationalist groups are finding common cause with you on that point. It doesn't concern me because many people agree with me. And all I'm saying, they want to leave. They can leave now. And it was crazy to me because I was actually on C-SPAN on Monday morning,

and there were so many people calling in being like, well, I agree with President Trump. Like, if these women don't like it, why don't they just go back to where they came from? If you don't like this country, if you don't like it the way it was founded, why are you here? You have the option to leave.

We don't keep you here. We're not a communist nation. So you can leave at any part you like. I was kind of like, oh, like, what? Right. To all the C-SPAN callers and everyone else out there who thinks the president has a point here, that the squad shouldn't be talking smack on America, The Daily Show made this montage for you. The United States has become the laughingstock and a whipping cup host for the rest of the

world. We don't have strength in our country. Our country has no spirit. Our country has no gravitas. We're a deader nation. We're broke. We don't know what we're doing as a country. Putin's a killer.

Why, you think our country's so innocent? You think our country's so innocent? Rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape. And the crime. And the gangs. And the drugs. Poverty and violence at home. War and destruction abroad.

We don't have a country anymore. The American dream is dead. The Squad responds Monday night in their own press conference. What do they say? Each one came up and talked one at a time. So we can either continue to enable this president and report on the bile of garbage that comes out of his mouth, or we can hold him accountable to his crimes. And I should note, so Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib both pretty explicitly called for Trump to be impeached. And Presley kind of had this interesting thing where she kind of said, Our squad is big.

Our squad includes any person committed to building a more equitable and just world. And that is the work that we want to get back to. And given the size of this squad and this great nation, we cannot, we will not be silenced. I think kind of trying to make it less seem like we are this group of four people just kind of alienating everybody and focusing on kind of the larger inclusive points. They all were saying.

This president does not know how to make the argument that Americans do not deserve health care. He does not know how to defend his policies. So what he does is attack us personally. Because that's easier for him to do, essentially. Right. It's easier to run against these four than to run against Warren or Harris even. What action does the House ultimately take against the president? They don't end up going full impeachment, right? What Congress decides to do is release a resolution condemning Trump's words as being xenophobic.

And they specifically say, These comments from the White House are disgraceful and disgusting, and these comments are racist. And the important distinction that they were trying to make is saying, we're not calling the president racist, we're calling his language racist. And the important distinction that they were trying to make is saying, we're not calling the president racist, we're calling his language racist. How shameful to hear him continue to defend those offensive words, words that we have all heard him repeat, not only about our members, but about countless others. But this like blew up into this whole other fight on the floor of the House this week,

where when Speaker Pelosi was introducing this bill and saying, you know, we urge all of our colleagues to condemn the president's racist language, House Republicans basically wanted her to take back her words and they tried to basically block her from being able to speak the rest of the day. Where exactly did the Republican Party in the House, in the Senate, come down on the language the president used, on the president doubling down on that language later? Some did condemn his language and said that it was uniphobic or racist. But many more kind of tried to put it back on the squad itself and be like. Well, we all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of communists.

They hate Israel. They hate our own country. The four horsewomen of the apocalypse. Now, they're entitled to their opinion, but I'm entitled to say that they're whack jobs. For most of the week, it felt like this was just mostly self-contained political fight in Washington, like an inside-the- beltway war about serious things like racism, like immigration. But then last night, there was this rally the president had in North Carolina, and it really seemed to escalate.

So Representative Omar blamed the United States for the terrorist attacks on our country... Yeah, so Trump was at a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, and he was talking about Ilhan Omar. Omar has a history of launching vicious anti-Semitic screams. And unprompted, the audience started chanting, send her back. Send her back! Send her back! Like, I saw a little girl behind the president chanting, send her back.

Like a little white girl in a Make America Great Again hat. Yeah. It just felt so bad for our country. Yeah, it felt pretty gross and disgusting. And the president, of course, doesn't stop it. He sort of like steps off the mic for a second to take it all in, then just continues right on with it. And, you know, Omar said negative things about Israel.

She talked about the evil Israel, and it's all about the Benjamins. Not a good thing to say. Yeah. We all know why Omar is being singled out explicitly, right? She's from Somalia originally. She's Muslim. She wears a headscarf. She is kind of like the easiest target for the president of the United States. And, you know, she certainly has kind of some of her rhetoric has become a flashpoint before in Washington. And the other thing is, you know, Trump earlier in the day had like openly questioned whether she had married her brother at one point. So, yeah, last night kind of felt like this like new low for the country. And I feel like it's going to get worse before it gets better. Adam Serwer from The Atlantic believes that this send-her-back chant from last night is actually a defining moment for American democracy, what it is now and what it's going to be.

I talked to him after the break. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. You know, people may be getting tired of sunset photos because of Instagram or whatever, but the other day, my friend Amy texted me a photo of a sunset that looked like Narnia-esque, you know, just idyllic, pinks, oranges, reds, purples. It seems to be on some sort of river, and there's some, like, daisies popping off in the foreground on some beautiful riverside grasses. There's some silhouetted trees.

It's got truly everything. And it turned out the photo was on a calendar. The photo's from Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge. Guess where it is? In the amazing state of Illinois. Amy's caption in her text was, Amazing Illinois. The point of this story is, it's amazing what you can find in Illinois. Visit enjoyillinois.com and find your Illinois. Because who are we kidding? Everyone's up for amazing. Adam Serber, staff writer at The Atlantic. Some of the outrage this week at President Trump's racist tweets surprised me.

Not because it's misplaced, but because this man used to recreationally promote the idea that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and because he essentially launched his political career saying that the Mexicans coming through the border were rapists. Do you think people have forgotten all that? I don't think people have forgotten it, but I think there is a distinction people may have made, which is that, you know, when I talked to Trump supporters during the campaign, they said, oh, well, those things he was saying, those were about illegal immigrants, not legal immigrants. And so it's different. And I think the president is not making a distinction between legal immigrants or illegal immigrants or even immigrants and citizens who happen to be people of color. He is telling all of them that they do not belong

here in the United States because of their political views, which itself is an argument that the citizenship of non-white people in the United States is conditional. And I think it symbolizes a sort of dangerous new escalation in the politics of the Trump era. I guess something sort of incredible about this week is that while the president himself has been issuing these racist tweets and sanctioning racism, he's also arguing that Representative Omar is the racist. Is that par for the course as well here? Yeah, I mean, look, that's really typical. I mean, when you go back to the first immigration law, you know, only allows free white persons to become naturalized. So from the beginning, we're talking about a country that says we're all created equal, but then creates a rule of

citizenship that only allows white people to be citizens. Throughout American history, that contradiction has provoked a kind of cognitive dissonance in an effort to reconcile we're all created equal with actually white people are more equal than other people. When the Civil War was over, the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stevens, who gave this extremely famous speech, how the cornerstone of the Confederacy is African servitude, the belief that the African is not equal to the white man. And then after the war, he's in jail, he's locked up, he's writing a diary, and he says, you know, I don't have any problem with black people at all. The story that reported that speech was fake news. The Civil War was really just about individual freedom and states' rights. And then when you look at, you know, the civil rights movement, white people in the South were saying, actually, it's the federal government who's the fascist.

And we just want our freedom and our liberty. And this is not about racism at all. In fact, we love black people. The champions of white nationalism in American history always invert the conflict so that they are the victims when, in fact, they are the ones who are trying to exclude people from the polity on the basis of race or religion. A lot of what we've seen this week has felt familiar to recent or more bygone history. But what happened last night felt different to me. It felt dangerous. I felt fearful for brown Americans the way I did after 9-11 when Muslims and Sikhs who were turbans were

attacked indiscriminately. Did last night feel new to you? I don't think we have ever seen an American president hold up a member of Congress, a refugee, a person of color, a religious minority as an object of hatred. We have had racists in the White House, we have had demagogues in the White House, and we have had people like George Wallace who have run explicitly on platforms of white supremacy. But I don't think we have ever seen an American president use their moral authority, particularly in this way. I think this is new. I think it's dangerous. And I think how Americans respond to it is really going to define what kind of country we're going to be. And like he has so often done in the past today, President Trump kind of halfheartedly tried to distance himself from the ugliness he himself encouraged.

I was not happy with it. I disagree with it. But again, I didn't say I didn't say that they did. I think any suggestion that the president disapproved of this chant is disingenuous. The chant is based on his tweet. He was the one who first expressed this sentiment. It was a horrifying sentiment, but he did something similar with Lock Her Up. At first, people were shocked by it, and then it became a campaign staple. Whether the line is drawn here or whether Trump will further seek to erode the foundations of multiracial democracy in the United States depends a great deal on how America's elected representatives respond to this. You published this piece today in The Atlantic titled What Americans Do Now Will Define Us Forever. will define us forever. And in it, you remind us that Barack Obama used to enjoy reveling in the fact that his particular story, born to a American white woman

and an African father with a name like Barack Hussein Obama becoming president, that this story couldn't exist in any other country in the world. And of course, last night we saw in that same country a Muslim woman being called to go back to the country she came from by a crowd of Americans. Is our national conversation on race devolving? I think devolving in some ways underestimates the extent to which this

conversation has always been with us. I think we are entering a dangerous new phase in part because the president himself, as opposed to, you know, some activist or some political faction, is now himself the champion of this racially exclusivist idea of American citizenship. But I'm reluctant to say the conversation is devolving because I think this is an important moral dispute, the resolution of which is going to define the country for years to come. So I think it's extremely important that people who believe in pluralism, who believe in the sort of civic nationalism represented by previous presidents and championed by previous presidents, those people should be defending those principles and not simply giving up in the face

of what is an extremely escalating, scary situation. For those people who are feeling scared right now, I wonder, is there an inevitability that people who want Representative Omar to go back to her country, quote unquote, are fighting a losing battle? This country's getting browner. Brown's going to brown. Are they eventually going to lose out? I really dislike the demography is destiny type of arguments because American whiteness is very protean. You know, at one point in American history, it actually excluded conditionally Italians and Jews. And we actually wrote immigration laws to exclude people from those countries from coming here in large numbers.

So I think that it is a mistake to assume that demographic changes will have a particular political effect. Coalitions shift, parties change. But I will say this, you know, for people who are concerned about this, you have every right to be concerned. This is a scary moment. The truth is, is that the Republican Party has made a big part of its political project restricting the electorate so that white voters have more influence than they would normally have. They recognize that they no longer represent a real majority of American citizens. And for what may be the first time in American history, you have an actively anti-racist majority

that has twice voted to oppose Donald Trump and what he represents. On the one hand, this is a very scary moment, but on the other hand, the American people are probably more progressive on the issue of racism than perhaps they've ever been. And that's not something that people should laugh at because it's probably never happened before. I would be remiss to not remind you before we go for the day that the great state of Illinois happens to just also be amazing.

It's got the Cloud Gate in Millennium Park. It's got that Paul Bunyan statue in Atlanta, Illinois. It's got the award-winning barbecue in Murfreesboro. Have you seen Lake Michigan in the summer in Chicago, y'all? Come on. It's amazing what you-winning barbecue in Murfreesboro. Have you seen Lake Michigan in the summer in Chicago, y'all? Come on. It's amazing what you can find in Illinois. Visit enjoyillinois.com and find your amazing. And one more amazing thing, Vox is launching a whole new not-quite-daily podcast.

It's going to be a thrice-weekly podcast, and it's going to be all about technology and the myriad ways it's changing the way we live and some of the scary stuff, too. You know, you got to be careful out there. It doesn't yet have a name as far as I know, but there are a bunch of job postings. If you just Google, you know, Vox Media careers, Vox careers, you can get to the careers page pretty easily. They're looking for an engineer, producer, even a host, even an executive producer. You name it. They're looking for it right now.

If you think you know someone who might be into it or if you yourself might be into it, throw your name in the hat. Very explicitly, the website you can find these jobs at is voxmedia.com pages careers jobs. Peace.