Poll: Most Americans believe Trump’s racist tweets were ‘un-American’
Those who feel that the president telling a group of Democratic congresswomen to "go back" to where they came from was asinine are not alone, in fact, they are in the majority
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A new USA Today/Ipsos poll found that a majority of Americans believe that President Donald Trump’s tweets taking aim at four Democratic ethnically diverse congresswomen is flat out “un-American.”
Some 68% of people who were polled agreed that Trump’s tweets blasting four ethnically diverse congresswomen fell in the realm of being offensive. Lawmakers have flatly labeled them racist and passed a resolution in the Democratic-led U.S. House condemning his insensitive statements.
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Trump has only doubled down on what he said, but has also had others like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell defend him, insisting his statements were not racist, and instead saying both sides should “lower the temperature.”
Despite Trump’s attempt to defend his comments saying he doesn’t have “a racist bone in my body” 1,005 people took the poll online Monday and Tuesday, with a large majority expressing frustration over his statements.
Trump made the comments in reference to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna S. Pressley. Each of the women are American citizens and only one, Omar, was not born in the United States.
“A majority see President Trump’s tweets as un-American,” said Cliff Young, president of Ipsos Public Affairs. “However, there’s a huge partisan difference in how we interpret what’s racist in this country.”
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According to the people surveyed, two-thirds, 65% said that telling minority Americans to “go back where they came from” was a racist statement. Nearly three-fourths of Democrats strongly agreed with that. Republicans were inclined to agree that the comment was racist, but only by a narrow margin, 45% to 34%.
Republicans were much more skeptical of charges of racism generally. Seventy percent agreed that “people who call others ‘racist’ usually do so in bad faith.” On that question, Democrats were split: 31% agreed; 35% disagreed.”
Read more outcomes from the poll here.