US President Donald Trump has redoubled his attack on four Democratic congresswomen, accusing them of “hating our country”.
“If you are not happy, if you are complaining all the time, you can leave,” he told a heated news conference outside the White House.
On Sunday, Trump called on the women, who are from ethnically diverse backgrounds, to “go back”.
He was widely accused of racism and xenophobia, which he denied.
“These are people that in my opinion hate our country,” President Trump told reporters.
“As far as I’m concerned if you hate our country, if you’re not happy here, you can leave. You can leave right now. I don’t know who’s going to miss ’em,” he said, to applause from some in the audience.
Asked by a reporter if he was concerned that his tweets had been seen by some as racist, Trump said he was not.
“It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me,” he added.
Trump sparked a furore in Sunday’s series of tweets in which he said the women “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe”.
He did not explicitly name the women, but the context made a clear link.
The four – US-born Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar, who came to the US as a refugee aged 12 – all called the president racist and were backed by members of the Democratic Party.
Ocasio-Cortez was born in the Bronx in New York, about 12 miles away from the Queens hospital where Trump was born.
Despite criticism, President Trump launched another Twitter tirade on Monday morning, calling on the women themselves to apologise.
