Elizabeth Harrington, the national spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, told listeners of the Breitbart News Tonight radio program on SiriusXM yesterday that President Trump’s racist tweets weren’t actually racist—and that it is actually Democrats who are racist.
A few days ago, Trump posted a centuries-old racist sentiment on his Twitter account, telling four progressive women of color serving in Congress to “go back” to the countries they “originally came from.” (Three of the congresswomen were born in the United States, but in his tweets, Trump depicted all of them as immigrants.) While some Republicans offered mealy-mouthed condemnations of Trump’s comments, the GOP and its media allies whipped up a spin cycle to defend Trump’s remarks.
Yesterday, Harrington told the people that listen to Breitbart’s radio show that, unlike Trump, the congresswomen at whom Trump aimed his racist rhetorical fire are “actually doing hate,” and accused them of “constantly engaging in anti-American rhetoric” and expressions of anti-Semitism. Harrington went on to accuse media of breaching journalistic standards by calling Trump’s remarks racist and by not lifting up the perspectives of people who don’t think his racist comments were racist.
“They condemned this president with a smear, calling him racist, when actually it is the other side who has trafficked in anti-Semitism and anti-American rhetoric,” said Harrington, who went on to accuse Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s ancestors of collaborating with Adolf Hitler.
“[Talib] proceeds in an interview to distort history, distort the Holocaust, and say that her ancestors gave the Jewish people a safe passage to what she calls Palestine. Well, the fact of the matter is her ancestors, the Arabs of the region at the time, worked with Hitler and collaborated with Hitler and their mission was to exterminate the Jewish people,” Harrington said.
She added, “It doesn’t matter what the president tweets. They will call him a racist, regardless. And the fact of the matter is, this president is actually celebrating our country, he believes in our country, the freedom, prosperity unlike we’ve ever seen in this history of the world.”
Later in the broadcast, Harrington claimed that 2020 candidates who note the influence of white supremacist ideology in the founding of the United States spreading “a disgusting, false, lie.”
(Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Harrington accused Rep. Ilhan Omar's ancestors of collaborating with Adolf Hitler. It has been updated to reflect that Harrington accused Rep. Rashida Tlaib's ancestors of collaborating with Hitler.)
