House Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said Sunday there was “no doubt” President Trump was a racist amid fallout over Trump’s tweets attacking four congresswomen of color.
“No doubt about it,” Cummings said, when asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos if Trump was a racist.
“I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt but when I think about what he said to these young ladies who are merely trying to bring excellence to government … when I hear those things it takes me back” to the era of segregation in the early 1960s, Cummings said on ABC’s “This Week.”
{mosads}Cummings compared both Trump’s tweets telling the four representatives, all of whom are American citizens, to “go back” to other countries and a subsequent chant of “send her back” at a North Carolina rally in reference to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) to his own experience in Baltimore, when he was attacked in 1962 while trying to integrate a swimming pool.
“I heard the same kind of chants, ‘Go home, you don’t belong here,’” Cummings told Stephanopoulos. “I’m not the only person of color who has had those kind of experiences.”
Cummings also defended the four representatives, three of whom – Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) — sit on the oversight committee.
“I interact with them every day. These are women who love their country,” Cummings said. “They work very hard and they want to move us toward that more perfect union that our founding fathers talked about.”