Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano this week decried President Trump’s tweet telling four congresswomen of color to “go back” where they came from, saying the wording was a rejection of America’s “melting pot” values.
“Even though hate speech — speech that expresses hatred for people, as opposed to hatred for ideas — stings and hurts, it is constitutionally protected,” Napolitano, a frequent Trump critic, wrote in a Fox News opinion piece published Thursday. “But when the hate speech comes from a shameless president, we have a problem.”
“It implicates a racial or nativist superiority: We were here before you; this is our land, not yours; get out,” he wrote. “Nativist hatred is an implication of moral or even legal superiority that has no constitutional justification in American government.”
In a previous opinion piece this week, Napolitano called Trump’s attack “racist.”
Trump went after Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) in tweets earlier this month, saying they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
The House voted largely along party lines to condemn his remarks as racist, with a handful of Republicans and Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.) voting with Democrats.
The president’s use of “go back” is a “dog whistle to groups around the country that hatred is back in fashion and is acceptable to articulate publicly,” Napolitano wrote Thursday. “‘Go back’ is a rejection of the nation as a melting pot; a condemnation of one of America’s founding values — E Pluribus Unum (Out of many, one).”