WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is spreading falsehoods on issues of race, immigration and American-ness, exhorting four non-white female lawmakers to “go back” to where they came from and crying foul over his failed bid to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
He suggests that the Democratic lawmakers, who recently sparred with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are foreigners better off leaving the U.S. than trying to tell Americans what to do. In fact, all four of the women, who were elected to the House in 2018, are Americans. All but one were born in the U.S.
Trump and his aides also seek to justify their now-abandoned effort to put a citizenship question on the census, claiming that the government asks many exhaustive questions but can’t on this one because of the courts. That’s false. The citizenship question has been asked on a separate government survey every year since 2005.
The statements came in a week of exaggerations and untruths by the Trump administration on a number of fronts: claiming an environmental legacy that is not his, falsely accusing special counsel Robert Mueller of being a criminal, and more.