Rashida Tlaib Says Donald Trump Is Trying 'To Distract' Us With Attacks As President Calls Her a 'Crazed Lunatic'

Representative Rashida Tlaib, in an interview on Tuesday, accused President Donald Trump of using his racist attacks against her and three other progressive Democrats as a tactic to distract the public from changes to asylum laws. On the same day, the president called the congresswoman a "crazed lunatic" after video resurfaced of her protesting one of his 2016 campaign speeches.

In an interview with the Authentically Detroit podcast, Tlaib argued that Trump's recent attack of her and three other members of the so-called "Squad" — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York, Ayanna Pressley from Massachusetts and Ilhan Omar from Minnesota — is "to distract us" while he is "behind the scenes trying to change asylum laws."

"He's also behind the scenes trying to disenfranchise communities of color by deregulating the [Environmental Protection Agency]," Tlaib said, adding that Trump also attempted to include a citizenship section in the nationwide census. "There are things being done right now to distract us."

Tlaib's comments came as Trump, also on Tuesday, called her a "crazed lunatic" after a video surfaced of the congresswoman protesting one of his speeches during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The video, resurfaced by various conservative websites earlier this week, showed Tlaib yelling "You guys are crazy!" to crowds of people as the then-presidential candidate delivered a speech at the Detroit Economic Club.

"I watched just this morning this Tlaib from Michigan," Trump told young conservatives during his address at a Turning Point USA conference in Washington, D.C. earlier today. "There is no way she stands for the values of the people of Michigan."

"I watched her this morning. She's vicious. She's like a crazed lunatic," the president continued. "She starts screaming, and this is not a sane person, folks, when you look at that. And this is what we're up against."

Tlaib's press secretary Adrienne Salazar confirmed that the congresswoman was thrown out of the event after she told the-then candidate "our children deserve better than [his] hateful rhetoric."

Trump escalated his ongoing feud with Tlaib and the three other progressive congresswomen, all freshman lawmakers and all women of color, last weekend when he urged them to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came," in a series of tweets.

Despite the president's suggestion that the lawmakers were all foreign-born, all but one were born in America. Congresswoman Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and moved to the U.S. as a child after her family fled from their home nation.