Trump Chants: "Lock Her Up!" (2016) "Send Her Back!" (2019)

I remember thinking that the Access Hollywood Tape, a videotape of Trump bragging about kissing and grabbing women's privates without their permission, would end Donald Trump's campaign for president. I was sure of it. I had no idea how many misogynistic men and women would vote for the guy, including good friends of mine, including a man I thought had too much integrity to vote for a guy like Trump. We are no longer friends. I consider his vote for Trump an act of betrayal.

#TimesUp. I've had enough. I can't believe that Trump has 45% support or less. That's way too much support for a guy who has had three wives, God knows how many affairs, one-night stands, and has hung out with Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted pedophile.

Proving once again the thesis of the book "The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison," Jeffrey Epstein got a sweetheart deal in court after his first conviction from Trump's former Secretary of Labor, Alexander Acosta, who was then the U.S. attorney in Miami. Acosta negotiated the 2008 plea deal with Epstein. Epstein, a multimillionaire who partied with Trump, Bill Clinton, and Prince Andrew of England in Palm Beach, avoided a federal trial and served only 13 months in prison for state prostitution [sic] charges for raping underage girls. I say "raping" because children can not be "prostitutes." Why? Because minors can not legally give their consent to sexual intercourse.

To distract us, no doubt, from Trump's videotaped hilarity and girl watching with Jeffrey Epstein, Trump went after the Squad, which is what Congressional Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC of Brooklyn, NY), Ayanna Pressley (MA), Ilhan Omar (MN), and Rashida Tlaib (MI) decided to call themselves after a photo shoot. AOC, Pressley, Omar, and Tlaib are all U.S. citizens and three were born in the United States. Ilhan Omar came to the U.S. from Somalia as a teenager. All four are women of color.

Trump made clear that he resents their telling him what to do. How dare a woman tell him what to do, especially a woman of color! Of course, he didn't like Hillary telling him what to do either.

"Go back to where you came from!" Trump said.

"Go back to where you came from!" is a racist trope known to African-Americans, many of whose ancestors were brought to the U.S. and the Caribbean from Africa by force to serve as slaves. That implies, according to an NPR commentator, that America is a white nation, and if you're not white, you need to go back to where you came from. Ironic, considering that Africans were chained to the bottom of slave ships and even thrown overboard on occasion. Considering the conditions on slave ships, I'm sure they would have preferred to stay in Africa. Many didn't survive the voyage.

I was glad that the Squad were given a chance to reply to Trump's slurs, because they had interesting things to say. All I'd previously known about Somali-American Rep. Ilhan Omar is that she'd said, "It's all about the benjamins, baby!" a familiar anti-semitic trope.

The Democratic response was pluralistic and not a specific rebuke of Omar's anti-semitism. Anti-semitism is rife in the Democratic Party. While it doesn't justify Trump's overt, toxic racism and misogyny by any stretch of the imagination, anti-semitism is one of the oldest forms of ethnic hatred in the world and has cost millions of lives over thousands of years, especially during the Holocaust during WWII.