Fox News' Andrew Napolitano blasts 'shameless' Trump for racist tweets: 'He unleashed a torrent of hatred'

Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano tears into President Trump for his recent attacks on four minority congresswomen in a new op-ed, concluding that Trump is "shameless" and not the person he has known personally.

"I have known President Trump personally since 1986," Napolitano writes in the op-ed for Fox News' website. "The private Trump I have known is funny, charming and embracing. That is not the public Trump of today."

Napolitano goes on to write that Trump "unleashed a torrent of hatred" when he attacked minority congresswomen by telling them to "go back" to where they came from, using a phrase that "implicates a racial or nativist superiority." Trump "raises a terrifying specter" with these attacks, Napolitano also says, which serve as a "dog whistle to groups around the country that hatred is back in fashion and is acceptable to articulate publicly."

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The Fox News host also blasts Trump for his rally crowd's recent "send her back" chant, saying Trump by seeming to embrace the chant created the image of a president "trying to divide rather than unite," especially as he praised the crowd days later even after saying he didn't support the chant.

Ultimately, Napolitano writes that the remedy for such hate speech is to shame the person who utters it, but "when the hate speech comes from a shameless president, we have a problem."

Napolitano, whose quotes have often made their way to the president's Twitter account, had previously hit Trump for his "xenophobic, racist and hateful" tweets in an op-ed, writing that he "sounds more like a Mafia don than a statesman." Read the full op-ed at Fox News.