Nadine Osman
Congresswoman-elect Rashida Tlaib branded President Donald Trump a racist on December 6.
“I truly believe he is racist, and that’s probably controversial, he is, it’s in his policies, it’s in his words, and the fact of the matter is that he’s still our president but it doesn’t matter, I’m going to hold him accountable,” Tlaib told The Hill.
Tlaib, along with Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, will be sworn in next month as the first two Muslim-Americans females in Congress. Tlaib will also become the first female Palestinian-American in Congress.
Trump has been criticised for using racially charged rhetoric during his tenure in office.
A prominent Congresswoman, Sheila Jackson-Lee, used Twitter to highlight Trump’s “dog whistle racism” after he demeaned three black reporters.
Trump has also attacked NFL players (the majority of whom are Black) who kneeled in support of the Black Lives Matter movement as “sons of bitches”. Trump also targeted basketball star Lebron James on Twitter, insulting his intelligence. In June 2017, Trump said 15,000 recent immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS” and that 40,000 Nigerians, once seeing the US, would never “go back to their huts” in Africa.
On January 11, Trump vulgarly called for less immigration from “s***hole countries” African nations, Haiti and El Salvador Haiti and Africa and more from Norway.
In a strongly-worded statement, the UN Human Rights spokesman, Rupert Colville, said: “There is no other word one can use but racist. You cannot dismiss entire countries and continents as ‘s***holes’, whose entire populations, who are not white, are therefore not welcome.”
The 55-nation African Union said the remarks were “clearly racist”.
After David Duke, the former Leader of the Ku Klux Klan endorsed him, Trump was reluctant to disavow Duke even when asked directly on television.
Trump hired Steve Bannon as his campaign head and later White House chief strategist. Under Bannon’s leadership, the website Breitbart made white nationalism a central theme. It featured a section, for example, on “black crime.” Tlaib said she does not understand Trump thinking, and many people in Washington are confused about his Twitter comments.
“There’s so much, even when I watch national media outlets, it’s baffling because we’re all guessing like what is in his mind, what do you think that tweet was about,” Tlaib said.
Fifty-five per cent of American voters believe race relations have soured under Trump, according to a survey in August.