Trump shill faces stinging backlash for defending John Kelly’s racism

When Trump shill Tomi Lahren took to Fox News to defend John Kelly’s latest racist tirade, she learned a hard lesson about her own privilege.

On “Watters World” Saturday night, Lahren and host Jesse Watters expanded on Kelly’s hateful remarks about undocumented immigrants. Watters compared refugees fleeing violence to people cutting the line at a restaurant. And Lahren tried to lecture them about American values.

“You don’t just come into this country with low skills, low education, not understanding the language, and come into our country because someone says it makes them feel nice,” Lahren said. “That’s not what this country is based on.”

“These people need to understand that it’s a privilege to be an American and it’s a privilege that you work toward — it’s not a right,” she said.

In an interview with NPR, Kelly insisted undocumented immigrants are “not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society.” He belittled them as “rural people” who “don’t speak English [or] have skills.”

But Lahren, like Kelly, is the product of generations of immigrants who, it turns out, didn’t all speak English.

“The 1930 census says Tomi’s 3x great-grandmother had been here for 41 years and still spoke German,” according to genealogist Jennifer Mendelsohn.

“Her 2nd great-grandmother had been here for 10 yrs. Spoke no English,” Mendelsohn tweeted, along with accompanying documents. “Her great-grandfather’s 1895 baptism from MN? Recorded in Norwegian.”

Others pointed out that the immigrants Lahren and Kelly smeared are among the people who built this country, along with black Americans enslaved by whites.

Lahren has learned a quick lesson at the hand of her own ignorance before. She drew heckles at a political conference when she revealed that Obamacare allowed her to remain on her parents’ insurance, even as she spent years attacking the law.

And Kelly’s rant isn’t the first time Trump’s minions have tried to erase the proud egalitarian history of American immigration. Senior adviser Stephen Miller actually attacked the Statue of Liberty during a White House briefing.

It’s not surprising that these are the people who surround Trump, who launched his campaign by declaring that Mexican immigrants are rapists. But their comments are no less repugnant for being predictable, and deserve the stinging backlash they received.