(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump declared that he’s winning a political fight with Democrats after the U.S. House rebuked him for racism over his attacks on four liberal women lawmakers.
“If people want to leave our country they can,” Trump told reporters Wednesday before departing the White House for a campaign rally in North Carolina. He added: “I do think I’m winning the political fight. I think I’m winning it by a lot.”
He further escalated the conflict after a reporter for One America News Network, a conservative cable network, asked whether his administration was investigating unsubstantiated rumors that one of the lawmakers he’s targeted, Representative Ilhan Omar, had married her brother to commit immigration fraud.
“There’s a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother,” Trump said. “I know nothing about it. I hear she was married to her brother.”
He said he was “sure somebody would be looking at that.”
Omar, elected in 2018, issued a statement during her congressional campaign calling the rumors “absolutely false and ridiculous” and saying insinuations that she had wed her brother were “absurd and offensive.” Her office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
Trump’s fight with the four minority women lawmakers -- Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib -- began with tweets on Sunday in which he said they should “go back” to where they came from. All are Americans and all but Omar were born in the U.S.
Many Democrats and some Republicans have called the tweets racist. Four Republicans and one independent who recently left the party, Michigan’s Justin Amash, voted for the House resolution rebuking Trump.
The president focused on the congresswomen after an intra-party dispute between them and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
To contact the reporter on this story: Justin Sink in WASHINGTON at jsink1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Justin Blum
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