MSNBC Panel Trashes ‘Send Her Back’ Trump Rally Chants: ‘More Than Sad… It’s Dangerous’

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes was not covering all of President Donald Trump‘s speech live, but the moment when Trump supporters erupted in chants of “SEND HER BACK!” about Ilhan Omar appalled the entire panel.

Hayed showed the clip before emphasizing, “That’s a crowd of Americans being incited by the American president to chant ‘send her back’ against an American congresswoman.”

“It’s a sad moment for the country,” MSNBC political analyst Zerlina Maxwell said, “but it’s not surprising in any way… What Donald Trump has done is normalize racism, that has been true going back to birtherism, and he makes it okay again to be overtly racist in public without any fear that there will be any societal repercussions whatsoever. And that is not something that I am willing to, you know, sit around and be silent about.”

Former assistant U.S. attorney Maya Wiley said “it’s more than sad, it’s dangerous.”

Hayes asked, “What’s the right way to characterize a crowd, an overwhelmingly white crowd, not exclusively, but an overwhelmingly white crowd chanting ‘send her back’ about a black woman who is a US congresswoman and US citizen?”

The Daily Beast’s Harry Siegel responded, “Racist, xenophobic, cruel, un-American. The question is what the rest of us are going to do about this as these animal spirits, if you like, have been unleashed.”

Hayes said at one point, “I think he’s making people worse… There’s an idea that there’s a sort of question is he just unleashing what people want to do anyway? And I think he keeps setting a bar for people and leading them towards things that are worse.”

Maxwell said many white people “don’t want to jump into this conversation about racism” at a time when that conversation is needed.

Hayes said Trump clearly thinks he can just “make enough people angry enough” to win.

Maxwell added Trump may be “miscalculating” because “he’s making block and brown people very angry as well, and hopefully without the barricades or the obstacles of voter suppression, we will turn out in ways that we did not in 2016, which will hopefully make it more like 2018.”
You can watch above, via MSNBC.

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