US house slams Donald Trump's racist 'go back' tweet

Washington : A divided United States House on Tuesday slammed President Donald Trump's racist tweet telling four minorities Congresswomen to 'go back' to their ancestral countries.

Mr. Donald Trump lashed out at the four Democratic women - Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesotta, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan - for the third day in a row, accusing them of "spewing some of the most vile, hateful, and disgusting things ever said by a politician in the House or Senate."

While several Democrats demanded a harsh punishment for the President, Republican lawmakers - the majority of them white men - stood with Trump against a resolution that rejected his "racist comments that have legitimized fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color."

Trump insisted in a string of tweets Tuesday morning that he's not a racist - "I don't have a Racist bone in my body!" he wrote - and the top two Republicans in Congress, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, made identical statements when pressed on Trump's remarks: "The president is not a racist."

Trump's series of tweets and comments began Sunday when the president said the four Democrats should "go back" to "the crime infested places from which they came."

With his tweets Tuesday, Trump made clear that he didn't want Republicans to support the resolution. Doing so, he said, would "show 'weakness.' "

In his latest tweets, Trump accused the four lawmakers of being "Horrible anti-Israel, anti-USA, pro-terrorist" and took issue with the "public shouting of the F . . . word, among many other terrible things."