Ohio Republican Calls on Trump to ‘Silence’ Rally Crowd if They Start Racist Chant in Cincinnati

Ohio Republican Congressman Steve Chabot said he hopes the crowd at Thursday night’s rally in Cincinnati will behave itself, but called on President Donald Trump to “silence” them if any racist chants like “Send her back!” start up.

Trump will be heading a rally at the U.S. Bank Arena in Cincinnati, Ohio Thursday night, his first such rally since he reveled in a racist chant of “Send her back!” at a rally in North Carolina. The chant was directed at Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a U.S. citizen who was born in Mogadishu, Somalia.

Chabot — who represents the Cincinnati area’s first congressional district — called on his neighbors to behave, and on Trump to “silence” them if they don’t.

“I would discourage the crowd from doing anything inappropriate and I think saying something like that would be inappropriate,” Chabot told The Associated Press in an interview, and added “I would hope that the president would silence the crowd, tell them, ‘Hey, don’t do that, there’s no place for that. It’s not helpful, it’s not right.’”

But Trump’s July rally chant was spurred by a series of racist attacks by Trump on Omar and three of her colleagues — Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) — in which Trump told the four women of color to  “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

All three of Omar’s colleagues were born in the United States.

Trump falsely claimed to have tried to stop the racist chant in July and feinted at disavowing it, before backtracking a few days after that.