GOP Leaders Choose Trump's Very Racist Hill To Die On

Speaking at their weekly press conference on Tuesday, House Republican leaders fervently supported President Donald Trump’s ongoing tirade against four congresswomen of color, insisting with one voice that the president’s many, many tweets weren’t racist (boy were they), and were very good.

House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney kicked things off by rattling off a litany of complaints against Democrats, stating at one point that they were the racist ones whose policies are “dangerous and wrong and would destroy America.”

Declaring that Republicans in 2019 are the “party of Lincoln,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said that he didn’t believe that Trump urging the so-called “squad” of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley to “go back” to their home countries (three of the four were born in the United States) was racist, either.

“This is more from their basis about politics,” McCarthy continued. “It’s unfortunate. We should get back to the business of America.”

Unsurprisingly, the president approved of being called a not-racist:

GOP Whip Steve Scalise—a man who allegedly once referred to himself as “David Duke without the baggage”—took things even further during the press conference, insisting that Republicans had never disrespected the office of the president while Barack Obama was in the White House.

“I called him ‘president of the United States, as we all did,” Scalise claimed, without mentioning that the current president was the animating force behind the racist birther myth or the fact that one of his colleagues interrupted Obama’s State of the Union address to shout “you lie” in the president’s face.

The House is scheduled to vote this afternoon on a resolution to condemn Trump’s latest racist outburst. Given the GOP leadership’s performance this morning, it’s clear that—should the resolution pass—the president will feel duly chastised and definitely apologize for his overt bigotry. (Just kidding.)