The rebuke is part of the coverup

How the occasional denunciation gives the GOP cover to enact Trump's agenda

President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

The president of the United States took to Twitter this week to ask a group of progressive congresswomen of color to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." The president's racist fulminations, obviously aimed at the self-styled "Squad" of newly-elected Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib (born in Detroit), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (born in Queens), Ayanna Pressley (born in Cincinnati), and Ilhan Omar (born in Somalia), generated stern newspaper headlines and outrage from out-of-office Republicans like former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, but comparatively little reaction from elected members of the party.

Then on Monday, a flurry of Republican officeholders bent to public pressure and issued tame statements of distaste for the president's behavior. Most of those who did speak up, like New York Rep. Elise Stefanek and Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, made sure to include a blistering attack on Ocasio-Cortez and her allies as part of their "denunciations." Others, like Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, condemned the tweets but refused to admit that they were racist. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has so far said nothing. This is a pattern that goes back to the very first days of Donald Trump's campaign in 2015 — long periods of silence about and complicity with the president's daily outrages and racist agenda, with sporadic pushback assigned to suburb-soothers before everyone moves along and forgets it ever happened.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
David Faris

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. He is a frequent contributor to Informed Comment, and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Indy Week.