has some obligation to defend its own people, like the news media will defend journalists under attack. you re an elected representative of the united states of america as are the four people who were attacked. republican members of congress have a special obligation to step up now. do you think, what i hear kevin mccarthy and senator lindsey graham doing, as i said, redirecting, so trying to get away from the racist comments that president trump said and trying to say these women are socialists. that s what women should be upset about. they re socialists. do you think the democrats are making a mistake tactically pause you re a strategist of allowing themselves to be branded as socialists, not coming up with some sort of new name. do you think that they re winning, republicans are winning in that kind of branding exercise. i think that anytime your strategy is to name call, to be racist, to use dog whistles and now under donald trump to just
sadly, this is not the first, nor will it be the last time we hear disgusting bigoted language from the president. we know this is who he is. this is the agenda of white nationalists and now it s reached the white house garden. reporter: trump later intensifying his racist clash in another tweet storm calling the congresswomen anti-american, and falsely insinuating representative omar without mentioning her name is pro-al qaeda. as few as 19 republicans in congress denounced president trump s comments. i think those tweets are racist and xenophobic. they re also inaccurate. reporter: most falling support of directly calling trump s statements racist. what was tweeted was destructive, was demeaning, was disunifying and frankly it was very wrong. reporter: other gop lawmakers backing the president s rhetoric. i don t think he s racist. i think he s an equal opportunity offender and i think from time to time some people
back to where you came from can t be understood as the word trope, i don t know what it is. many would be uncomfortable with the idea that the platform could take down the tweets of the leader of the free world. three weeks ago, twitter brought in a new policy whereby they said if a leader like trump is to break our rules, we will label it. we will say he has broken our rules but we are leaving the tweet up because it is in the public interest and people can hold him accountable. even here, we say the company is reluctant to do that. they re not labelling it. they didn t label it. the bottom line is the notion of president trump has created so many challenges for twitter. it s just clear they don t know what to do it with. absolutely. and i mean, if you think about in 2015, we saw the role social media played in the rise of trump and how russia used it to interfere in the election. these policy decisions, when you think about twitter leaving this up, facebook leaving the nancy
why they are not acting on it. isn t the bottom line, really, that twitter is a sham? i think twitter is extremely sensitive towards the claims of perceived anti-conservative bias, which you see from republicans pretty much every week. senator ted cruz is holding a hearing on that very issue today of perceived bias. forget democrat, forget republican, forget liberal, forget conservative, weren t they going to label falsehoods, and this tweet is rife with inaccuracies. these women are u.s. citizens. the three of them were born here, so it s wrong, so were they going to also label things that were this much in the public interest that were inaccurate. that is again another massive challenge for them. that is something twitter has been far behind facebook on. facebook has been labeling false information, twitter not so much, but again, another challenge and particularly as we see in the lead up to 2020. unwilling or unable to curate
they hate it with a passion. reporter: president trump unapologetic defending his racist twitter tirade aimed at four democratic congresswomen of color after telling them sunday to go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. it doesn t concern me because many people agree with me, and all i m saying, they want to leave, they can leave. now, it doesn t say leave forever. it says leave if you want. reporter: all four congresswomen are u.s. citizens and three representatives, alexandria ocasio-cortez, ayanna pressley, and rashida tlaib were born in the united states. representative ilhan omar, a somali refugee moving to the u.s. when she was 12. fighting back against the president s divisive words. he does not know how to defend his policies so what he does is attack us personally. and that is what this is all about.