President Donald Trump’s speech at a rally Thursday night in Minneapolis brought forth media accounts that claimed the president was racist, out of control and mean.
Allyson Chiu of the Washington Post exemplified the tone of coverage in her piece: “‘Stunning in ugliness & tone’: Trump denounced for attacking Somali refugees in Minnesota.”
Chiu wrote in her lead that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who has created significant controversy even within her own party for her racist remarks, had been “predictably singled out” for six minutes of Trump’s speech.
“As photos of Omar wearing a headscarf flashed across jumbo screens at the Target Center in the city, Trump ramped up broadsides against the freshman lawmaker, slamming her as an ‘America-hating socialist’ and a ‘disgrace,’” Chiu wrote.
Chiu raised the point about Omar wearing a headscarf to imply Trump’s production people had portrayed her that way to cause racist outrage. But a search of Google for images of Omar revealed no photos in which she is not wearing a headscarf.
As for Omar, the New York Times pointed out in “At Minneapolis Rally, an Angry Trump Reserves Sharpest Attacks for Biden,” by Annie Karni and Peter Baker, that although Trump said she “married her brother in order to come into the country … no proof has emerged substantiating the marriage claim.”
Some proof has emerged. In June 2012, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, her second husband and the one suspected of being her brother, posted a photo of him holding her third child shortly the girl was born and calling her one of his “nieces,” which suggests he was siblings with Omar. She also tweeted a Father’s Day message to her father, Nur Said, which some have said indicates, based on the names, that he is her brother.
PolitiFact, Snopes, the AP and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune all have looked into the story and determined, by wiping social media and other records, Omar has made it impossible to tell whether her second husband was her brother.
The AP warned of political problems for Trump if he attacked Omar in Minneapolis, part of which she represents in Congress. “The district is now held by Omar, the Somali-American lawmaker whom Trump often holds up as a symbol of the liberal shift of the Democratic Party. It’s a message viewed as racist by some,” wrote Steve Karnowski in “‘Welcome to Minneapolis’: Trump rally roils liberal bastion.”
Karnowski went on to write, without evidence, that Trump’s approach to Omar “drew criticism from fellow Republicans uncomfortable with the prospect of putting race at the center of the campaign.” No Republicans have made public remarks along the lines Karnowski suggested. He attributed the notion to “four Republicans close to the White House who were not authorized to discuss private conversations.”
CNN “fact-checker” Daniel Dale continued to repeat a number of false assertions about the president. For one, Trump said new wall is being built, and Dale says otherwise. But CBS and others have reported that sections of new wall – not replacement for old wall or repairs to existing wall – is being constructed in New Mexico and along the California border.
He also claims Trump is lying about wanting to protect patients with pre-existing conditions and that his legal fight to have Obamacare ruled unconstitutional makes this a lie. Trump has proposed a number of ways to do this outside of Obamacare. Dale has misled on this point repeatedly.
Politico called it “one of his most vitriolic appearances to date,” in “’These people are sick’: Trump’s ire against Washington boils over” – subhead: Rather than focusing on usual ‘Make American Great Again’ topics during his Minneapolis rally, the president went hard after his adversaries in Congress and the media”—by Matthew Choi.
Choi said Trump “repeated unfounded claims that the former vice president worked to nix a Ukrainian investigation into his son when Hunter Biden sat on the board of an energy corporation in Ukraine.”
There is video of Biden bragging about exactly that.
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