Trump’s Rust-Belt Rally Risks Return of ‘Send Her Back’ Chants
Trump’s Rust-Belt Rally Risks Return of ‘Send Her Back’ Chants
(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump held a political rally Thursday evening in Cincinnati, the president’s first campaign event since his racially divisive attacks on the black chairman of the House’s main investigative committee and the city of Baltimore.
Trump’s visit to the battleground state of Ohio came on the heels of two Democratic debates where the president’s incendiary comments were a central issue. He said nothing on Thursday to inflame the controversy, but future rallies will offer further prime-time opportunities.
Trump’s opponents regard his attacks on Representative Elijah Cummings and on four female House members who are minorities as racist, intended to galvanize his political base.
Last month, the crowd at a Trump rally in North Carolina chanted “send her back!” after the president criticized Somali-born Representative Ilhan Omar, an episode that drew rebukes from both Democrats and Republicans. There were concerns ahead of the Cincinnati rally that supporters there might repeat the chant.
“If they do the chant we’ll have to see what happens,” Trump said Thursday as he left the White House for the rally. “I prefer that they don’t.”
Trump didn’t criticize Cummings or Omar by name at the Cincinnati rally. “We want no controversy,” he told his audience. The crowd at one point chanted “lock her up,” Trump supporters’ familiar refrain about Hillary Clinton, and booed protesters, but was otherwise unremarkable.
The day after the North Carolina rally, Trump briefly tried to distance himself from the refrains -- a reference to tweets in which he invited Omar and three other Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” to their home countries. The other three lawmakers were born in the U.S. Trump told reporters he was “not happy” with the chant and that he would intervene if it happened again, but a day later seemed to reverse himself, celebrating the North Carolina crowd as “incredible patriots.”
‘Least Racist’
Trump has since delved even deeper into racial controversy. He has spent days disparaging Cummings, who heads the House Oversight and Reform Committee, and Baltimore, the Maryland city he represents in Congress. Trump called Cummings’s district “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” where “no human being would want to live.”
For good measure, Trump also attacked civil rights leader Al Sharpton as a “con man” who “hates whites” after Sharpton traveled to Baltimore to defend Cummings.
No modern president has embraced the politics of racial division as openly as Trump. On Tuesday, religious leaders at the National Cathedral in Washington issued an unusual statement asking, “when will Americans have enough?”
Trump has defended himself by claiming that he is “the least racist person there is anywhere in the world” and by touting low black unemployment during his presidency and initiatives that he says will help minority populations. He told reporters at the White House this week that there was “zero strategy” behind his remarks.
Yet, more than half of registered voters -- including 46% of white voters -- now believe the president is racist, according to a poll Quinnipiac University conducted July 25-28, before most of Trump’s comments on Cummings and Baltimore.
‘Tired, Old Language’
Ohio officials and the Cincinnati Enquirer have implored Trump supporters to avoid a repeat of the North Carolina chants. The newspaper’s editorial board urged them not to “take the bait” and Republican Representative Steve Chabot told the Associated Press he hopes Trump would silence any inappropriate chants from the crowd.
Democratic presidential candidates have seized on the controversy, signaling that race will remain a defining issue in the 2020 election.
“Mr. President, this is America,” Democratic frontrunner and former Vice President Joe Biden said Wednesday during the second night of Democratic primary debates in Detroit. “We are stronger and great because of this diversity.”
Cory Booker, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, accused Trump of “using the tired, old language of demagogues, of fear-mongers, of racists to try to divide our country against itself.”
Trump’s rally in Ohio on Thursday represents his third campaign visit to the battleground state during his bid for re-election. He made more than a dozen visits to the state in 2016 and won Ohio by about 8 percentage points. Former President Barack Obama narrowly won the state in both of his elections.
Trump has courted Rust Belt voters by promising to renegotiate trade deals and slapping tariffs on imports of steel and other foreign imports. And his supporters point to big gains in manufacturing jobs -- some 264,000 in 2018 -- as evidence Trump has bolstered the sector.
“Democrats will destroy the economy and kill millions of jobs in states across the country with their vendetta against coal, oil, and natural gas,” Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement on Thursday. “Their radical plan to eliminate those industries will devastate workers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, New Mexico, Colorado, and elsewhere.”’
To contact the reporters on this story: Jennifer A. Dlouhy in Washington at jdlouhy1@bloomberg.net;Justin Sink in Washington at jsink1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Michael Shepard
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.