GOP Campaign Chairman Defends Ilhan Omar, Claims There is ‘No Place’ for ‘Send Her Back’ Chant

  |  
Jul 19, 2019

The chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is chiding the crowd of enthusiastic Trump supporters who chanted “send her back” regarding Somali refugee Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) at a rally in North Carolina this week.

“There’s no place for… ‘send her back,’” said Rep. Tom Emmer, who leads the NRCC. “I disagree with that completely.”

While Emmer may criticize the patriotic exuberance of Trump’s supporters, he is careful not to condemn the President himself.

“There’s not a racist bone in this president’s body,” Emmer told journalists at an event hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. “What he was trying to say is that if you don’t appreciate this country, you don’t have to be here.

Emmer believes that Trump being on the ballot will allow ‘Never Trumpers’ to vote against the President while supporting down-ticket Republicans, which will help the GOP as a whole. He indirectly blames Trump for losses during the mid-term elections in 2018.

“The last election we heard a lot of people, especially in suburban seats, that were going in, they wanted to vote against the president and all they had was to vote against our guys,” Emmer says. “This time they get a choice.”

Emmer does admit some fault for the 2018 elections, believing that he and other GOP leaders failed at defending themselves adequately on the issue of health care.

“We never explained to the American people that there was no Republican that would ever advocate for eliminating coverage of pre-existing conditions,” Emmer says. “I just think we did a very poor job of it.”

While Emmer may not approve of the crowd’s reaction toward Omar, he offers some strong words of his own for her and her Congressional colleagues Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Ayanna Pressley (D-IL), commonly referred to as “The Squad.”

“This is not a squad. This is an army of socialists,” Emmer says, calling them “The New Red Army” citing the fact that dozens of Democrats have signed on as co-sponsors for the Green New Deal that would essentially legislate totalitarian communism in the U.S.

“We’re going to be aggressive. We’re not going to back off on that,” he says.

They will be aggressive, but not too aggressive. Omar has been widely accused of immigration fraud, allegedly marrying her own brother in order to receive a green card under fraudulent pretenses.

However, attacking her based on these allegations is considered off-limits and unacceptable by the Republican Party establishment, who wants to be able to control the narrative heading into next year’s election cycle.

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