Trump presses attack on Democrat congresswomen amid outcry over racist tweets

In a series of tweets at the weekend that Democrats and other critics called racist, the US president told the non-white lawmakers to ‘go back’ home

On Monday, he went on to demand that the women apologise for their ‘foul language’ and the ‘terrible things they have said’

Reading Time:5 minutes

Published: 10:23pm, 15 Jul 2019Updated: 11:33pm, 15 Jul 2019

US President Donald Trump continued his attack on four non-white congresswomen on Monday, demanding that the female lawmakers – who he said should go back to the “broken and crime infested” countries they came from – apologise.

Even as White House officials moved to defend the incendiary tweets Trump had sent over the weekend, the president was refusing to apologise and asked on Twitter when “the radical left congresswomen” would “apologise to our country, the people of Israel and even to the office of the president, for the foul language they have used, and the terrible things they have said.”

“So many people are angry at them and their horrible and disgusting actions,” he wrote.

Trump starkly injected race into his criticism of Democrats over the weekend, drawing searing condemnation from members of the party who labelled his remarks racist and breathtakingly divisive.

Asked whether the comments were racist, Marc Short, chief of staff to Vice-President Mike Pence, defended Trump, telling reporters he had been responding to “very specific” comments made by Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who was born in Somalia, and not making a “universal statement.”

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