You might hope that the issue of death threats against a sitting Congresswoman would be rather clear-cut, with the bulk of America against those responsible. This week, Trump campaign adviser Marc Lotter proved that hope ill-founded, trying to justify a rash of death threats that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) has faced and even blame them on her.
President Donald Trump himself has joined in on the pile-up against the Congresswoman, tweeting a video that’s been viewed millions of times and counting that seems to implicate her in the 9/11 terror attacks on account of her Muslim identity. It cuts back and forth between remarks Omar offered trying to distance Islam at large from the attacks and footage from that fateful day.
Potter thinks that’s no big deal, telling CNN:
‘I don’t think it’s the president that’s putting her in danger, I think it’s her ill-thought-out words that she used to describe the greatest terror attack in the history of the United States soil which killed nearly 3,000 Americans… Make no mistake, no congressperson, no American should be threatened and no one is inciting violence. I think what they’re doing is showing outrage toward words that should have been better thought out.’
So in other words — Potter seems to think that those who’ve threatened to gun Omar down have a perfectly legitimate basis for doing so, even if he personally wouldn’t engage in the behavior and would push for another course of action for those responsible. Good to know!
“I don’t think it is the President putting her in danger. It is her ill thought out words,” says Trump 2020 Campaign aide @marc_lotter on Rep. Ilhan Omar.
“I’m not going to tell the President what he should or should not do with his Twitter account.” pic.twitter.com/cf09NSWEbr
— New Day (@NewDay) April 15, 2019
The commentary he referred to has been taken wildly out of context by conservative leaders in recent days and weeks. Discussing anti-Muslim animosity in the United States, Omar said that Muslim leaders who tried to bridge the divide after the attacks recognized that “some people did something” that did not reflect on the entire community. She was not attempting to minimize the impact of the attacks, and she wasn’t even attempting to deny the attackers’ connection to Islam. She was trying to bring people together like other national leaders should in theory be concerned with — but instead, Trump’s got his campaign adviser on national television saying that he gets where people are coming from who threaten to violently murder a sitting Congresswoman.
Besides the many threats that Omar says she’s faced “directly referencing or replying to the President’s video,” at least two people have been arrested recently at least in part for their plots to murder the Congresswoman. A New York man was arrested after phoning her office with a threat to “put a bullet in her fucking skull,” while Coast Guard Lieutenant Christoper Hasson was targeting Omar with his own wide-ranging domestic terror plots.
And Potter still seems to think the whole situation is no big deal all the same! House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said that the chamber’s security official was going to coordinate a security assessment for Omar and her family with the Capitol Police, who themselves originally handled that New York man’s case. Imagine how far we’ve fallen when a member of Congress needs police protection after a president comes out against them.
Featured Image via screenshot
