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The four progressive freshmen congresswomen who in recent days have come under attack from President Donald Trump will respond to the president in an unusual news conference scheduled for Monday evening.
Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., called the news conference in order to respond to the president’s “openly racist comments attacking the duly elected members of Congress,” according to a press release issued by Omar’s office.
The conference comes one day after Trump said on Twitter that the lawmakers should “go back” to the “places from which they came.” All four congresswomen are U.S. citizens and three of them were born in the United States.
Trump doubled down on his remarks on Monday, both on Twitter and during an event at the White House, alleging that Omar “hates Jews” and that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., made a racist comment of her own while rising to the defense of her fellow Democrats.
Pelosi had said Sunday that Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan, Make America Great Again, “has always been about making America white again.”
“So, Speaker Pelosi said, ‘Make America white again.’ That’s a very racist — that’s a very racist statement,” Trump said at the White House event Monday.
Trump’s comments were condemned by Democrats and some Republicans, including Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., the only black Republican senator, and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. The congressional GOP leadership was mostly silent on the issue.
