Trump blasts minority Democrats, rally crowd chants 'send her back'

President Trump used a campaign rally in North Carolina on Wednesday to stoke his supporters’ anger over a group of four minority, progressive Democratic congresswomen, drawing boos and chants of “send her back” when he ramped up his attacks.

The scene laid bare Trump’s effort to use the group to frame Democrats as extreme ahead of the 2020 election but also fueled the notion that he is seeking to exploit the nation’s racial divisions for political gain.

“The leading voices of the Democrat Party are left-wing extremists who reject everything our nation stands for,” Trump told the crowd in Greenville, N.C. “These left-wing ideologues see our nation as a force of evil.”

The president then mentioned each of the four Democratic lawmakers by name, running through a laundry list of quotes he said proved they are out of the mainstream. When Trump was in the middle of a diatribe against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), the crowd broke into chants of “send her back.”

The president continued his days-long attack against Omar, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Somalia, over her past statements about al Qaeda, the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, ISIS and Israel.

Trump also mocked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) by refusing to call her by her full name. “We’ll call her Cortez. Too much time,” he said.

He joked Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), who is black, could be related to the singer Elvis Presley and of Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), he said “that's not somebody that loves our country.”