Philadelphia mayor and a longtime Trump critic, Jim Kenney, made no bones about his opinion of the US president over the latter’s recent remarks about four Democrat lawmakers, in which he suggested that they should “go back from where they came from.”
“I have this vision of one day in heaven, or outside of heaven because they’re not going to get in, Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Tom Homan and everybody else standing in a Cyclone-fenced dungeon, a Cyclone-fenced cell outside of heaven for eternity because that’s what they’re going to have to do because what they’re doing now is so anti-human, antithetical, anti-American, anti-decent. It’s all terrible what they’re doing,” Kenney said Tuesday.
He elaborated by saying that “the step the president took yesterday when he told four American citizens to go back where they came from makes him an idiot because he didn’t know they were born in Detroit and Chicago and New York, so that’s the problem.”
“If Donald Trump ever has to go back where he came from, he’s going to have to go to hell,” he concluded.
The comment was made as Kenney announced a new initiative to provide illegal immigrants facing deportation with legal support.
On Sunday, Trump posted a series of tweets suggesting that “Progressive Democrat Congresswoman” should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” He did not call the lawmakers by name, but it is widely understood the tweet was aimed at four Dem Representatives known collectively as “the Squad”: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar.
On Monday, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi attacked Trump, calling his remarks “racist” and “xenophobic,” adding that Trump seeks to “make America white again.” Trump later attempted to mock Pelosi after she repeated what the president had said word for word, by calling her repetition of his precise words a “very racist statement,” and adding that he was surprised.
Kenney has a long history of blasting Trump in colorful expressions: in 2018, he called the president a “scary guy” and a “fragile egomaniac” over his decision to pull the invitation to the Philadelphia Eagles to the White House. In 2017, he called him a “despot” and “unstable,” A WHYY report says.
