White House counselor Kellyanne Conway on Tuesday snapped back at a reporter's question about President Donald Trump's attacks on four Democratic congresswomen of color with a startling query of her own, asking, "What's your ethnicity?"
Andrew Feinberg, a White House reporter for a Breakfast Media website that focuses on politics and technology, had asked Conway, "If the president was not telling these four congresswomen to return to their supposed countries of origin, to which countries was he referring?"
Conway then replied: "What's your ethnicity?"
"Why is that relevant?" Feinberg retorted.
"Because I'm asking a question. My ancestors are from Ireland and Italy," Conway said.
The exchange — caught on videotape posted by Feinberg — came during an exchange with the media on the White House driveway Tuesday, when Conway was repeatedly asked what Trump meant when he tweeted earlier this week that progressive Democratic congresswomen should "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came."
From there, the exchange devolved into a back-and-forth that included Conway saying "a lot of us are sick and tired of this country, of America coming last to people who swore an oath of office."
"My own ethnicity is not relevant to the question I'm asking," Feinberg said.
"Are you saying the president was telling the Palestinian American to go back to the occupied territories?" he continued, referencing one target of Trump's remarks, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., a Palestinian American who was born in Michigan.
Tlaib is one of the four progressive lawmakers whom Trump has repeatedly attacked in recent days. The other three are fellow Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.
Rep. Omar, a Somali refugee, moved to the United States when she was 12 and is a naturalized citizen; Ocasio-Cortez, who is of Latin American descent, was born in New York; and Pressley, who is African American, was born in Cincinnati.
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