Trump’s racist Twitter tirade about “the Squad,” explained
Is there a method to the madness?
By Matthew Yglesias@[email protected] Jul 15, 2019, 1:00pm EDT
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Congresswomen Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Omar, And Pressley Hold News Conference After President Trump Attacks Them On Twitter
U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), speaks while Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) listen during a press conference at the U.S. Capitol on July 15, 2019 in Washington, DC. Photo by Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images
Donald Trump has a decades-long track record of racism that includes everything from calling for the execution of innocent teenagers to breaking fair housing law. This fact about him drifts on and off the news agenda, but he put it squarely back on over the weekend with a few tweets that exhorted four new Democratic members of Congress to “go back” to the “corrupt” countries they are from.
Three of the four were born in the United States, and the fourth, Rep. Ilhan Omar, left Somalia when she was 6 and settled in the United States when she was 10.
Donald J. Trump
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@realDonaldTrump
So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly......
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Donald J. Trump
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@realDonaldTrump
Replying to @realDonaldTrump
....and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how....
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Donald J. Trump
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@realDonaldTrump
Replying to @realDonaldTrump
....it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!
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The tweets prompted a firestorm of criticism, which, in turn, led to Trump trying to narrow the focus on Omar specifically in Monday afternoon remarks to the press while also saying that accusations of racism don’t bother him “because many people agree with me.”
The larger context for this is that the four members Trump is talking about were in the midst of a fight with House leaders over border funding, a conflict that’s really just the latest battle in an ongoing feud between the two sides. Trump seems to have started weighing in on this subject primarily in hopes of intensifying the feuding, but did so in such a clumsy manner as to be extremely helpful in encouraging Democrats to patch things up.
At the same time, while his blundering and uncouth behavior seems to have put a fairly low ceiling on his approval ratings, Democrats have reason to worry. When Trump orients American politics around racial conflict, it’s a setting fundamentally favorable to the GOP.
Donald Trump versus “the Squad”
In June 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shocked the political world by beating incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley in a primary. Crowley was a pillar of the House Democratic leadership operation and had been widely seen as the most likely successor to the current troika of near-octogenarians — Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Steny Hoyer (D-MD), and James Clyburn (D-SC) — who sit atop the leadership hierarchy.
Upon taking office, AOC has formed an informal alliance with Reps. Omar and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), who won open seats in Minnesota and Detroit, and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), who knocked off a progressive incumbent Democrat in a primary challenge that, unlike AOC versus Crowley, did not actually have much clear ideological content at the time. These four women of color are all very left-wing, represent very safe seats, are on the younger side for Congress, and have gotten enmeshed in a multifaceted dispute with House leadership.
That fight was on one level about supplemental border security funding, but on another level, it’s about a persistent sense that the Squad’s high media visibility is a threat to the reelection efforts of the much larger crop of first-term lawmakers who won previously GOP-held seats.
On yet another level, it’s about the fact that AOC and some of her staff have close ties the Justice Democrats, a group that is mounting a primary challenge to Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar and threatening several other incumbent Democrats. But regardless of the specific ins and outs of the controversy, the spat had become pretty all-around embarrassing, with back-and-forth accusations of racism and procedural criticisms drowning out the actual policy content.
Trump likes to needle his opponents and doesn’t seem particularly interested in the governance of the United States, so it’s natural that he would tweet about the controversy.
And his main idea seems to have been to echo an argument that Tucker Carlson made the previous week specifically about Omar — that it’s dangerous for the United States to accept into its midst refugees who grow up to be critical of aspects of American culture rather than grateful cheerleaders for it.
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