There wasn’t anything ambiguous in Donald Trump’s racist rant at a rally in New Hampshire over the weekend. And yet, Republicans are once again bending over backward to pretend he didn’t say exactly what he meant when he said immigrants from South America, Africa, and Asia are “poisoning the blood of the country.”
“I think he was talking about the Democratic policies,” New York Representative Nicole Malliotakis told CNN’s Abby Phillip Monday. “I know some are trying to make it seem like President Trump is anti-immigrant. The reality is, he was married to immigrants—he’s hired immigrants.”
It was an absurd defense, as Phillip pointed out to the GOP lawmaker: “He was talking about people—not policy,” she said. But Malliotakis wasn’t alone: While some of her colleagues on Capitol Hill were either trying to ignore the remarks or dismissing them as merely “unhelpful,” as North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis described them, others have joined her in defending Trump against critics, who have pointed out the similarities between his rhetoric and that of Adolf Hitler.
“I could care less,” Lindsey Graham said on Meet the Press when asked about Trump’s out
