Looking at statements like this and the absolutely pathetic attempts to pour cold water on or justify them I can't help but think of how it fails at absolutely every level possible once you analyze it. I mean, even beyond the blatant racism.
To start with the ability of the individual to reshape the politics of the country they're in when they disagree with them by communicating with their leaders, forming a consensus, and voting is the fundamental basis of democracy. Yet here it's being treated as an insult instead while Donald Trump is in the middle of loudly proclaiming he hates how the country has been run and is changing it himself. My way or exile isn't a democracy, it's a dictatorship. And dictatorship is supposed to be against American principles.
The Congresswomen were not even demanding the laws or fundamental values of America change it's quite the opposite. They want Trump to start respecting the laws instead of pretending they aren't there while making up phantom violations that don't actually exist to draw attention away from his policies being illegal and pointlessly cruel and to stop mutating America into the antithesis of every value it has ever professed to the rest of the world. Trump has attacked the very founding principles of the country on numerous occasions. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of expression, equality in the eyes of the law, the right to due process, even the one right that the Republican party has consistently considered more important than any other: the right to bear arms in a bid to look tough after yet another mass shooting. He's gone as far as publicly denouncing America to ingratiate himself with foreign dictators and even in his own comment he inadvertently called America a crime-ridden, barely functional mess. If anyone hates America and especially its laws it is him.
Trump is establishing himself personally as the sole will of America, he doesn't see the American people as a body he is in service to but as a rabble that needs to get in line behind him or be culled.
Every American has the right to make their voice heard by government and in addition to that these Congresswomen were elected by Americans - including the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose right to be American at all would cause spontaneous human combustion from the sheer outrage and indignation among the freedom-loving patriots who spend most of the rest of their time polishing their guns and accusing right-leaning moderates of being communists in anticipation of exercising their second amendment rights in the opposite of the way it was intended if it were ever so publicly undermined - as the vehicle of their own right to do so. Saying these women have no right to an opinion in the eyes of the American government isn't just denying them individually, it's a slap in the face of every voter they represent and the broader system of elected representation in its entirety.
Telling people to go home and fix their own countries is not only contrary to the function of democracy but overtly hypocritical considering the reasons America even exists in the first place all boil down to people not being willing or able to do exactly that and/or looking for easy money elsewhere in the world. George Washington didn't go to England to “fix” monarchy and lack of representation. The pilgrims didn't “fix” religious persecution and eventually just started doing it themselves. Fortune seekers, menial labourers, farmers, and homesteaders from all over Europe didn't “fix” poverty, famines, and overcrowding before staking a claim in the New World. They did however hold everyone else to an entirely different standard. But getting back to telling people to leave if they don't like the current politics of the democracy they live in rather than exercise their right to vote when the country you're blindly assuming they were originally from isn't a democracy where people do have the right to enact change through legal means what you're really telling them to do is get back to you when they're willing to violently take a country over to get their own way. I'll give you a minute to think how that can go wrong. And in the case of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who was born in New York just like Trump but is ethnically Puerto Rican this runs into the slight self-defeating complication in that in addition to AOC being born in the same city as the man telling her to get out of "his" country even if she did go to her “ancestral homeland” Puerto Rico happens to be an American held territory conferring citizenship from birth and the reason Puerto Rico is an American territory to begin with is that when they gained their autonomy from Spain to be able to fix their own problems without having to fight a bigger government to do so America waltzed in and just took the place over invalidating exactly that bit of “advice” in numerous ways. And America selectively applying laws using an explicitly racist holdover provision from the colonial era in order to give private enterprise the tax exempt, regulation-free playground the GOP keeps saying would do America a world of good has fucked the place right the hell up.
At the most basic level it's an indication that Trump and by extension the Republican party will not listen to the merits of issues before making judgments on them and have criteria for who they're willing to hear out at all. Forget the blind assumption that anyone that isn't white isn't from America, they're unwilling to hear of issues that affect Americans if they simply don't feel the person speaking to them is American enough by their definition for their liking. They don't look out for all Americans, not just in terms of racial divisions when they don't like your face but if your interpretation of the constitution and political views differ from their own then it doesn't matter if you're the working poor or their own political peers: they don't think it's worth doing their actual job if it means showing half an ounce of respect or passing along a benefit to someone that doesn't already toe their line, the responsibility of their position be damned. They will happily hang Americans out to dry out of spite while demanding they always be respected in a way they refuse to reciprocate. Even if the source of a concern is actually entirely foreign it is still prudent, good sense, and a requirement of the job to determine if it's an issue of concern to America and weigh the issue before making a statement. And the statement Trump made was – at kindest – one of ignorance from a man in a position where he can't afford to mis-speak lest it be taken as a declaration of intent which can potentially cause international incidents. The other option is that he is knowingly lying to the American people, and I shouldn't have to explain why THAT is a problem for a country's leadership.
