On Sunday the President told four Congresswomen of color to "go back" to the countries "from which they came." Just in case you need the racism spelled out for you: in this tweet, Trump is assuming that these women are not "originally" Americans because they are brown and black. He is therefore conflating the white race with American citizenship, echoing the central tenet of white nationalism.

This is of course nothing new from a President who called Mexicans "rapists," who said a judge couldn't rule impartially due to his Mexican heritage, who condemned people "on both sides" in Charlottesville, and whose list of racist acts and comments go back many years. But what is new is Democrats deciding to vote on a resolution today calling on Congress to condemn Trump's racist comments.

Things are going pretty much the way you'd expect them to. This morning, according to the Washington Post, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy refused to call Trump's tweet racist and told his caucus not to vote for the resolution.

And as of right now—two days after the tweet—Washington's Republican members of Congress are taking the same route. One of them, Rep. Dan Newhouse, hasn't even said anything yet after requests from multiple reporters.

Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Jamie Herrera Beutler, and Newhouse did not respond when The Stranger asked if they thought Trump's tweet was racist. Nor did they respond when asked how they'd vote on the resolution. This, too, is nothing new. None of them said anything after Trump called El Salvador, Haiti, and African countries "shithole countries" last year, either.

In a tweet yesterday, Rep. Herrera Beutler, who's running for re-election in Southwest Washington, would only admit that her colleagues were Americans. She refrained from calling the President's tweet racist, deciding instead to issue a general call for civility on both sides. "We can & must defend our ideas on how to improve our country w/o descending into divisive & demeaning language," she wrote.

In a statement released yesterday, Rep. McMorris Rodgers would only call Trump's tweet "wrong" before repeating McCarthy's deflections about socialism.

Rep. Newhouse hasn't said anything.

You can count the number of Republicans in Congress willing to call Trump's tweets racist on one hand. So far, according to CNN's tally, only Rep. Will Hurd (the only black Republican in the House) and Rep. Mike Turner have used the term. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said Trump used "racially offensive language." The rest have either deflected, defended him, dissembled, or generally condemned the tweets as "unacceptable."

Trump clearly loves this fight, and Republicans don't mind it either, partly because it takes some attention away from from the fact that they're separating children from their parents and running overcrowded, filthy, concentration camps at the border.

But they also love it because they know they'll win this argument. They'll win because the majority of Americans, especially white Americans (and especially white Americans working in media), apparently think the term "racist" can only be applied when a white person is literally in the process of enslaving a black or brown person.

A majority of the country refuses to call obviously racist comments and actions racist because it would mean implicating themselves in white supremacy, which is the logic of American racism. It would mean confronting the fact that they, too, to some degree, assume that all white people they meet come from America while all brown people they meet "originally" come from Mexico City or Mumbai. It would mean confronting the fact that white supremacy is woven into nearly every aspect of American popular culture and politics. It would mean confronting the fact that white supremacy courses through us all, and that it takes real work—constant, daily, even hourly work—to stop personally perpetuating it and to build anti-racist systems. But white Americans are lazy. It's easier for them to say "be nice!" than it is to face facts, hear criticism, honestly analyze their words and actions, and not be a bunch of racists. Until white Americans get over their white fragility, Trump will continue to win this fight.