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President Trump on Thursday disavowed the “send her back” chant that broke out at his re-election rally Wednesday night when he railed against a Somali-born congresswoman, as Republicans in Congress rushed to distance themselves and their party from the ugly refrain.

Mr. Trump said he was “not happy” with the chant, directed at Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a hijab-wearing freshman Democrat whom the president has singled out repeatedly for verbal excoriation. On Thursday he claimed that he had tried to cut off the chant, an assertion contradicted by video of the event. Asked why he did not stop it, Mr. Trump said, “I think I did — I started speaking very quickly.”

In fact, as the crowd roared “send her back,” Mr. Trump looked around silently and paused as the scene unfolded in front of him, doing nothing to halt the chorus.

“I was not happy with it,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday at the White House. “I disagree with it.”

“I didn’t say that,” he added. “They did.”

Mr. Trump’s effort to dissociate himself from his own supporters reflected the misgivings of his allies, who have flooded the upper echelons of his team with expressions of concern in the wake of a rally that veered into ugly nativist territory. They warned privately that the president was on dangerous ground, according to people briefed on the conversations.

Among them were House Republican leaders, who pleaded with Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday morning to separate the party from the message embraced by the crowd in Greenville, N.C.

“That does not need to be our campaign call, like we did the ‘lock her up’ last time,” said Representative Mark Walker, Republican of North Carolina, a top official in the party’s messaging arm, who attended the rally and tweeted hours later that he had “struggled” with the chant. “We cannot be defined by this.”

Still, while they denounced the chant, Republican leaders declined to criticize Mr. Trump.

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On Tuesday, President Trump convened his Cabinet in the White House. First to speak after a long, rambling, and inaccuracy-filled monologue by Trump himself was Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. In a Cabinet where flowery praise of the President has become standard, Carson outdid himself. A celebrated brain surgeon whose odd asides had been one of the minor subplots of the 2016 Republican Presidential primaries, Carson has largely existed on the margins of the Trump show since joining the Administration, except for one brief scandal in which his spending of more than thirty thousand dollars on office furniture was revealed. He had an important role to play this week, however.

Carson is the lone African-American in Trump’s Cabinet, and Tuesday’s meeting took place forty-eight hours into a furor over the President’s Sunday-morning tweets attacking four left-wing Democratic members of Congress, all of them women of color. The Squad, as they are collectively known, should “go back” to the countries they came from, Trump tweeted, although three of the four are U.S.-born and all, of course, are American. The tweets were instantly condemned as racist, but the President, unrepentant, seemed to want to keep the fight going. First, Carson was sent to Fox News to provide cover for Trump. “I have an advantage of knowing the President very well, and he’s not a racist, and his comments are not racist,” Carson told viewers. At the Cabinet meeting, Carson offered more validation for the President. Here was his contribution to the national dialogue, as recorded by the White House’s own transcript:

SECRETARY CARSON: Thank you, Mr. President. And just before I talk a little bit about what’s going on at HUD, I just want to thank you for your incredible courage—

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you.

SECRETARY CARSON: —and stamina and resilience with unwithering criticism, unfair criticism, all the time. And I would just, sort of, sum it up by saying: Would you rather have a non-politician whose speech is unfiltered, who gets a lot of stuff done? Or somebody with a silver tongue who gets nothing done?

THE PRESIDENT: But I thought I had a silver tongue. [Laughter.] I heard that so often. I always thought I had a silver tongue. [Laughter.] But I agree with you.

SECRETARY CARSON: But, you know, as I told you before, I think God is using you.

Carson’s shameless sucking up to Trump, an act of self-abasement on live television, was hard to watch. But it wasn’t treated as news. Few accounts even remarked on it. His brief appearance as Trump’s human shield did nothing to halt the accusations that the President is an unreconstructed racist. Trump himself essentially ignored Carson’s defense, not only not retreating from his tweets about the four freshman Democratic congresswomen but going to a campaign rally in North Carolina, on Wednesday night, where he launched an extensive, pre-planned attack on them. One by one, he read their names from his teleprompter, stopping when he got to that of Representative Ilhan Omar, an immigrant from Somalia, and listening with apparent approval as thousands of red-shirted MAGA fans chanted, “Send her back! Send her back!”

The racism, it turns out, wasn’t a mistake, a slip of Trump’s otherwise silver tongue, as Carson would have it. It was a calculated political play, and the news of the last few days was that Trump had revealed it so clearly: this is how he intends to run for reëlection, in 2020.

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“I didn’t say that,” he added. “They did.”

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Originally posted by Nina:

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“I didn’t say that,” he added. “They did.”

Spoken like a true leader of men.

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CBS News has learned President Trump took a lot of heat from his family over the racist chants at a campaign rally in North Carolina on Wednesday. He heard from first lady Melania Trump, his daughter Ivanka and Vice President Mike Pence.

Mr. Trump on Thursday disavowed the chants of "send her back" and said he tried to stop it. "Well, number one, I think I did, I started speaking very quickly," he said.

But the video tells a different story. The president stands in silence for nearly 15 seconds, looking around the arena. When Mr. Trump resumed his speech, he made no mention of the chant, which started after he attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar.

The rally left Republicans once again answering for the president. CBS News learned that Mr. Trump spoke to several members of his inner circle about how to react to the chant. He weighed the pros and cons of softening his tone, worried supporters would not like it.

But ultimately, he declared unhappiness. Congressional Republicans also expressed concerns to Pence and asked him to relay the message to the president.

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I saw the video; he was basking in the adoration that went with the chant and loving every minute of it.

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I am finding it hard to say much more about him without breaking my own rule about avoiding use of the f-word.

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Originally posted by Horace:
I suppose the 2020 election if nothing else will present an interesting study of the limit case of how many votes can possibly be mined by the left through messaging entirely comprised of "vote for us or be racist".

I suppose the theory is that people don't know whether they're racist, are open to being convinced either way, and trust that voting the correct way will cure them of the affliction, if they are concerned that they may have it.

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Originally posted by Piano*Dad:
We're due for a recession. Nasty like all recessions, but not particularly brutish, and probably short. Some event or events will trigger it, building on existing precipitating factors.