Seeing Through the News Cycle Fog

President Trump’s racist tweets aimed at sitting U.S. Congresswomen showcased our broken national dialogue…

Aaron Charles
9 min readJul 23, 2019

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When President Donald Trump tweeted that four sitting U.S. Congresswomen should “ go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” it set off a firestorm of a news cycle that continues to reverberate today. The reason for this should be clear.

The tweet itself — from the personal account of the President of the United States — was racist and anti-American.

If you’re compelled to stop reading after that statement, please consider something before you go. Representatives Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley are all American citizens. They were all elected by their constituents. Three of the four were born here in the United States. To say that they should “go back” to another country when they are democratically-elected American citizens is so unconscionable that it should be universally repudiated.

I won’t say that the backlash to President Trump’s comments has been universal, but it has been bipartisan and widespread.

However, President Trump himself has doubled down on his comments for multiple reasons — one of which is the fact that he says there are many out there who agree with him.

This is where the news cycle has broken.

President Trump’s comments were wrong. Full stop. But the conversation has quickly shifted away from the comments to other topics. President Trump and those that do agree with his rhetoric say that the four U.S. Congresswomen (known as “The Squad), have such far-left policies that they themselves are anti-American and this, in turn, makes such rhetoric acceptable.

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Aaron Charles

Christ-follower. Husband to @SarahLCharles. Simple moments hold great power. Connect with me at my website: www.aarondcharles.com