‘The Squad’ are helping Trump more than they realise
All it took for President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign to gain momentum was a single tweet and four women of colour lambasting him. But love it or hate it, racism it was not, writes Miranda Devine.
It’s amusing being in the US to watch Donald Trump convulse his opponents for 10 days with a gratuitous tweet about four bolshie female politicians.
“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe … loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run,” he tweeted on July 14.
“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 it is done.”
Cue outrage ever since.
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The Squad, as the four women dub themselves, are first-time politicians and self-described WOCs, or “women of colour”.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley play the identity politics game hard.
They represent the extreme left of the Democratic party, but hog most of the limelight.
They dismiss criticism of their brattish grandstanding as racism, misogyny and Islamophobia.
They use their WOC identity as a shield to prevent the censure they deserve.
But Trump is not going to go easy on them because of their gender or the colour of their skin. Forget chivalry. When it comes to calling out dopes he’s an equal opportunity offender.
Since The Squad are all American citizens and Pressley, Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib were born here, Trump has been branded a racist by all and sundry.
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AOC, 29, and Tlaib, 42, are the daughters of migrants, Puerto Rican and Palestinian, respectively. Omar, 37, migrated from Somalia as a child. But what they share, along with Pressley, 45, is a view of America as a shamefully racist country with an evil history.
AOC compares America to Nazi Germany. Omar is an Islamist anti-Semite who took to wearing the hijab after 9/11 terrorist attacks which she dismissed as “Some people did something”. She once declared: “This is not going to be the country of white people.”
So Trump was not attacking the women’s race, but their disloyalty. He simply suggested they put America’s faults in perspective. If it’s so bad why are so many illegal migrants jumping the border?
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“If you’re not happy in the US, if you’re complaining all the time, you can leave, you can leave right now,” he said.
The deplorables at Trump’s rally this week chanting “Send her home” aren’t racist either. They just object to the denigration of their flag and the country they love.
Patriotism is their religion and Trump knows it. That’s why patriotism is the theme of his re-election campaign. And The Squad just gave him a running start.
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