As of this writing, hours after the fact, Trump’s basking in the violent cries of “Send her back!” directed at Representative Ilhan Omar has yet to yield any response from Speaker Pelosi, Leader Hoyer, or the Democratic National committee, although the latter’s “war room” was watching the rally, and Hoyer had time to tweet about emoji.
I don’t know where the party is.
Pelosi gave a speech yesterday that I’m sure she was very proud of, and which annoyed the Republicans to no end, but her silence today makes her words yesterday ring hollow and performative. This is not leadership, and it isn’t solidarity. It’s not even allyship. Does she really need time to think of how to respond to something like this, or did she just find it a distraction from thinking about her next message bill?
There are pundits who brag about having warned us to take Trump seriously as a threat as early as the Summer of 2016, and it makes me angry. Some of us were warning about him by the Fall of 2015 when most Beltway pundits still saw him as a joke.
Now it’s the Summer of 2019—four years later—and while Trump stokes and then smugly takes in the racist, xenophobic cries of his supporters, the leadership of the Democratic Party somehow still seems incapable of reacting or responding to the magnitude of the threat in any serious manner.