‘Charlotte Observer’: ‘Are You OK With A Racist President, Republicans?’

In a scathing editorial, the Charlotte Observer, a major North Carolina paper, attacked President Donald Trump, blatantly calling him “racist” and urging state Republicans to stand up for what’s right.

The article mostly focused on the president’s recent slew of xenophobic tweets telling four congresswomen of color, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts), to “go back” to where they came from. Of the four representatives he targeted, only Omar was born outside of the United States, and all are American citizens.

“‘Go back where you came from’ is among the worst of racist tropes. It divides us by ethnicity and skin color. It says that even if someone is a citizen or legal immigrant, they are not part of the rest of us,” The Charlotte Observer’s editorial board wrote on Monday. “That runs contrary to who we should be as Americans, and if Donald Trump didn’t know it when he typed the words, he surely did later when people responded with appropriate outrage.”

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But the “same president who referred to Haiti and African nations as ‘shithole countries’ and said African visitors would never ‘go back to their huts’ once again doubled down on his racism,” the newspaper added.

The editorial also called for the states Republicans, including top-level officials such as Sen. Richard Burr and Sen. Thom Tillis, to stand up against the president’s racism.

Trump won North Carolina in 2016 by 3.6 percentage points, but it is unclear whether he will be able to carry the state again in 2020. Latinos, African Americans, Asians and Native Americans make up over a third of the state’s population, and the president’s xenophobic rhetoric has proved unpopular among many of the minority groups which he frequently insults.

The Observer continued its piece by stating that the GOP is “firmly Donald Trump’s party now. It’s the party where insults and other ugliness are just being ‘rough around the edges,’” the Observer noted. “It’s the party where locking legal migrants in crowded, unhealthy cages is acceptable immigration policy. It’s the party where it’s OK to say racist things so long as the next jobs report is encouraging.”

The paper finished up its seething attack by saying that Republican lawmakers, including those in North Carolina, are “bowing to the worst of who we are.”

Article by Daniel Knopf