Mayor Kenney on Trump's tweets about congresswomen: 'Go to hell'

'If (Trump is) ever gonna have to go back where he came from, he's gonna have to go to hell'

Mayor Jim Kenney held a press conference on Tuesday, condemning President Donald Trump for his racist tweets about four congresswomen of color.
Thom Carroll/PhillyVoice

Mayor Jim Kenney had some choice words for President Donald Trump this week. 

Kenney held a press conference about Trump's racist tweets in which the president told four congresswomen of color — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna S. Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib — to "go back" to their countries. All four are American citizens. 


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"The step the president took (on Monday) when he told four American citizens to go back where they came from makes him an idiot because he didn't even know they were born in Detroit, Chicago, and New York," Kenney said on Tuesday. "And if Donald Trump has to go back where he came from, he's gonna have to go back to hell." 

In tweets posted on Monday, the president said the women "originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe" and they should "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." 

Kenney joins a chorus of those criticizing the president for the statements. 

A measure proposed in the House to rebuke the president for the tweets ground to a partisan halt on Tuesday, in which all House Democrats and only four Republicans voted to condemn the president. This is the first measure of its kind in the House in more than 100 years, according to the New York Times.

“There’s no excuse for any response to those words but a swift and strong, unified condemnation,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said as the House debated the resolution. “Every single member of this institution, Democratic and Republican, should join us in condemning the president’s racist tweets.”

"I have this vision of one day in heaven, or outside of that, because they're not going to get in, Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Tom Holman, and everybody else, standing in a cyclone fence dungeon, a cyclone fence cell, outside of heaven, for eternity because that's what they're gonna have to do," Kenney said during the press conference on Tuesday. "Because what they're doing now is so anti-human, antithetical, anti-American, anti-decent. It's all terrible what they're doing."


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