How Herd Mentality Seems To Govern GOP Officials’ Responses To Trump’s Racism

Sometimes, when a public official says something so racist that it stands out as exceptional, the Talking Points Memo team begins keeping an active tally in a shared Slack channel of others’ responses.

On Monday, as members of Congress came back to D.C. under the cloud of some exceptionally racist tweets from the President, the Slack channel buzzed with copying and pasting once again, as Caitlin MacNeal, Nicole LaFond, Kate Riga and Cristina Cabrera flagged down statements and I reached out to individual offices for comment, for what would ultimately become our headline on the response: “Top GOPers Silent.”