Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) said President Donald Trump wasn't a "human" on Monday while being asked repeatedly about a recent interview where she seemed to compare him to President Barack Obama.
A Fox News reporter repeatedly asked Omar as she walked down the hallway with an aide whether she thought the two presidents were largely the same, as she had suggested in a recent interview.
As she was about to get into an elevator, she turned to the correspondent and snapped, "Absolutely not. That is silly to even think and equate the two. One is human, and the other is not."
The rookie lawmaker, who's made headlines with anti-Semitic remarks twice in the last two months, spoke to Politico for a feature where she appeared to trash Obama, perhaps the most popular politician among Democrats in the U.S. She said his "hope and change" was a mirage and criticized his border and drone policies:
As she saw it, the party ostensibly committed to progressive values had become complicit in perpetuating the status quo. Omar says the "hope and change" offered by Barack Obama was a mirage. Recalling the "caging of kids" at the U.S.-Mexico border and the "droning of countries around the world" on Obama’s watch, she argues that the Democratic president operated within the same fundamentally broken framework as his Republican successor.
"We can’t be only upset with Trump. … His policies are bad, but many of the people who came before him also had really bad policies. They just were more polished than he was," Omar says. "And that’s not what we should be looking for anymore. We don’t want anybody to get away with murder because they are polished. We want to recognize the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile."
Balking at headlines that said the new progressive star was criticizing Obama, she tweeted she was an Obama fan and included audio from her interview that she said proved the reporting was wrong. However, the audio only served to confirm Politico's account, and the reporter, Tim Alberta, ripped her for ambushing him on Twitter instead of making a phone call to register a complaint. Omar eventually deleted the tweet.
She's no stranger to deleting tweets at this point. She's erased several anti-Semitic ones and others that caused controversy, such as ones disseminating false information about the Covington Catholic incident at the Lincoln Memorial.