Buchanan declines to call Trump’s tweets racist, votes against resolution
Following what has widely been seen as a string of racist insults against four congresswomen by President Donald Trump, U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan said he doesn’t “agree with everything the president tweets.”
Trump tweeted Sunday that a group of progressive Democrats — Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York — should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
Three of those representatives are minority women who were born in the United States, and each is a U.S. citizen.
Buchanan, R-Longboat Key, issued a statement to the Bradenton Herald when asked for a reaction to those comments, using the opportunity to criticize House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s planned resolution vote to condemn Trump’s social media posts.
Buchanan joined most of his fellow House Republicans in voting against the resolution.
“If Speaker Nancy Pelosi put as much energy into addressing the country’s problems as she does in denouncing the president, we wouldn’t be facing a crisis at the southern border,” said Buchanan.
“While I don’t agree with everything the president tweets, Pelosi’s resolution on the House floor today is another example of why Washington is so dysfunctional,” he continued.
Florida senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott told reporters Monday that they didn’t see the tweets as racist, but indicated that they did not approve of the comments. Trump doubled down on his remarks again Tuesday, calling it a “Democrat con game.”
High-ranking Trump allies, such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have also been reluctant to label Trump’s tweets as racist, but Democrats have been quick to decry the comments. The four elected officials who Trump called out also held their own press conference Monday, citing the comments as “a distraction from our core values as American citizens.”
This story was originally published July 16, 2019 at 4:21 PM.
