Rep. Ilhan Omar Tweets Maya Angelou’s ‘Still I Rise’ After Trump Rally Erupts in ‘Send Her Back’ Chants

After being vilified by President Trump at his North Carolina rally on Wednesday night—where supporters broke out into chants of “Send her back!”— Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) responded by tweeting out a line from Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise.” “You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I’ll rise,” the freshman congresswoman tweeted. Her comments came after Trump quadrupled down on his attacks on Omar and three other Democratic congresswomen of color at a rally in Greenville, just days after sparking outrage by saying they should “go back” to where they came from. Trump supporters began chanting “Send her back!” at the rally after Trump told them the Somalia-born congresswoman, who is a U.S. citizen, “looks down with contempt on the hardworking American, saying that ignorance is pervasive in many parts of this country.”

Several 2020 candidates took to Twitter to blast Trump for his latest comments. Frontrunner Joe Biden said the four congresswomen targeted by the president “are an example of exactly what makes America great.” Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) tweeted that she would not share Trump’s message on her own Twitter page, but said that it “defiles the office of the President.” Sen. Gillibrand (D-NY) said that the one common denominator in all Trump’s messages “is contempt for women and anyone who threatens this president's fragile ego.”