Trump Says He’s Winning Fight With Democrats After House Rebuke

(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump declared that he’s winning a political battle with Democrats after the U.S. House rebuked him for racism over his attacks on four liberal women lawmakers.

“If people want to leave our country they can,” Trump told reporters Wednesday before departing the White House for a campaign rally in North Carolina. He added: “I do think I’m winning the political fight. I think I’m winning it by a lot.”

He further escalated the conflict after a reporter for One America News Network, a conservative television channel, asked whether his administration was investigating unsubstantiated rumors that one of the lawmakers he’s targeted, Representative Ilhan Omar, had married her brother to commit immigration fraud.

“There’s a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother,” Trump said. “I know nothing about it. I hear she was married to her brother.”

He said he was “sure somebody would be looking at that.”

Omar, elected to represent a district in Minnesota last November, issued a statement during her congressional campaign calling the rumors “absolutely false and ridiculous” and saying insinuations that she had wed her brother were “absurd and offensive.” Her office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Trump laid out a bill of complaints about the four women at a political rally later Wednesday in Greenville, North Carolina. He focused largely on on Omar and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

Trump listed a number of remarks he said Omar had made that he considered unpatriotic or anti-Semitic, including comments on al Qaeda and Israeli influence on U.S. politics. “Send her back!” the audience at the rally chanted at one point.

Ocasio-Cortez, Trump said, has “conducted outrageous attacks against men and women of law enforcement” by criticizing the behavior of Border Patrol officials and conditions at detention centers on the border with Mexico. Trump said that she had said “essentially, Nazis are running concentration camps” on the border.

Ocasio-Cortez has publicly used the phrase “concentration camps” to describe U.S. detention centers but has not called immigration authorities “Nazis.”

Trump had less to say about the other two women in the group he’s targeted, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. His attacks began with tweets on Sunday in which he said they should “go back” to where they came from. All are Americans and all but Omar were born in the U.S.

Many Democrats and some Republicans have called the tweets racist. Four Republicans and one independent who recently left the party, Michigan’s Justin Amash, voted for the House resolution rebuking Trump.

The president focused on the congresswomen after an intra-party dispute between them and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

To contact the reporters on this story: Justin Sink in WASHINGTON at jsink1@bloomberg.net;Josh Wingrove in Washington at jwingrove4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, John Harney

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