The Squad of Trump’s 2020 dreams

US President Donald Trump has decided the risk of being labelled racist is outweighed by the political benefit.

The Squad: Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley during a news conference at the Capitol in Washington.

Days before Donald Trump unleashed his war on the four liberal Democrat women known as The Squad, one of them, Ayanna Pressley, revealed what she expected from minority members of congress.

“All of you who have aspirations of running for office, if you’re not prepared to come to that table and represent that voice, don’t come,” Pressley, an African-American congresswoman, told a political conference. “Because we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice.”

Her comments highlight the inflexible identity politics that sits uneasily next to members of The Squad’s portrayal of themselves as the voice of conscience and tolerance in Trump’s America.

Did Pressley mean that black or brown people were traitors if they did not follow the progressive orthodoxies of The Squad? Did they have a greater obligation to serve their race or religion than to serve the broad spectrum of voters who elected them?

Trump has been widely and rightly condemned for his aggressive and divisive comments, which many across the country, including the House of Representatives, deemed to be racist. Having laid the groundwork to fire up his supporters along racial lines, Trump appeared to revel in the moment when the chant “Send her back” echoed around the stadium at his rally in Greenville, North Carolina, this week in relation to his attacks on Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar. It was one of the ugliest moments of his presidency and caused such an outcry that he later claimed he didn’t support the chant, despite laying the groundwork for it.

“I wasn’t happy with that message that they gave last night,” Trump said. “I was not happy when I heard that chant.” Asked why he didn’t try to shut it down, Trump claimed he did so by starting to speak “very quickly, and I think you know that”. His claim is not supported by video of the rally, which shows he stood back from the podium and paused for a full 13 seconds.

The spectacle has led many Americans to ask: who are the so-called Squad of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Omar and Pressley?

According to Trump adviser Kelly-Anne Conway, they represent a “dark underbelly” of the US that does not cherish America, its values or its flag. What’s more, she says, they are political show-ponies, celebrity politicians rather than real ones.

“(They) have done squat in congress other than pose on magazine covers and go on late-night comedy shows and cause trouble in their own caucus,” ­Conway says.

Yet The Squad, and especially its unofficial leader, 29-year-old Ocasio-Cortez, known as AOC, have become a political phenomenon among younger progressive voters wanting to see a left-wing revolution in US politics. Together these four women have almost seven million Twitter followers, with AOC recently gracing the cover of Time magazine under the headline “The Phenom”.

But their ability to garner publicity doesn’t hide the fact all four are still learning the game, having arrived in congress only this year. All are from ethnic minority backgrounds: Somali-American Omar, 37, and Palestinian-American Tlaib, 42, are the first Muslim women to be elected to congress. AOC is of Puerto Rican descent.

Their election victories were seen as a vindication of the story of America, where anyone can rise from anywhere to hold high office. This group naturally gravitated towards each other in congress as minority women who shared the same left-wing ideology. Led by the outspoken and passionate AOC, they are stridently critical of Trump and especially his policies on border protection.

“You are angry because you can’t conceive of an America that includes us,” AOC says of Trump. “You rely on a frightened America for your plunder.”

The Squad has embraced democratic socialism and seeks to remake the Democratic Party in its own image to reflect the hot-­button issues of progressive millennials. Its members embrace policies on immigration, climate change, healthcare and the economy that are more left-wing than anything the Democrats have previously adopted, much less mainstream Americans.

These include support for AOC’s grandly ambitious Green New Deal, calling for the US to get 100 per cent of its power needs through renewable and “zero-emission” energy sources within a decade. They call for a “Medicare for All” universal healthcare system; free college eduction; the dismantling of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE; decriminalising of illegal border crossings; and the closure of border detention centres, which AOC has labelled as “concentration camps”. She also supports a top marginal tax rate of 70 per cent.

Democratic leader and house Speaker Nancy Pelosi believes these policies are too extreme for middle America and, if adopted, they would pose a direct threat to the Democrats’ chances of defeating Trump next year. Pelosi, a centrist, argues that to win, the Democrats need to regain the trust of those moderate middle-class voters who shifted to Trump in 2016. These swinging voters will not be attracted to a Democratic Party that has lurched sharply to the left.

Polls suggest that while The Squad may be wildly popular among its young urban support base, it is distinctly unpopular with some other voting groups.

A poll published by political website Axios found that among white non-college-educated voters — the group that shifted from the Democrats to Trump in 2016 — AOC was recognised by 74 per cent of voters but only 22 per cent had a favourable view. Omar was recognised by 53 per cent of voters but only 9 per cent had a favourable view.

This is why Trump is doing all he can to attack The Squad, keep them in the headlines and trying to portray them as the face of the Democrats.

“The Democrat Congresswomen have been spewing some of the most vile, hateful, and disgusting things ever said by a politician in the House or Senate, & yet they get a pass and a big embrace from the Democrat Party,” Trump tweeted this week.

“Horrible anti-Israel, anti-USA, pro-terrorist & public shouting of the F… word, among many other terrible things, and the petrified Dems run for the hills.”

Trump focused his attack on Omar, who was born in Somalia and whose parents came to Minneapolis as refugees in 1997. The mother of three is the highest elected Somali-American and has pushed a progressive agenda on minimum wages, affordable housing, healthcare and student debt forgiveness, among other issues.

But she has become a villain to conservatives because of a series of anti-Semitic comments and a major gaffe when talking of the 9/11 terror attacks. In February Omar, a Muslim, tweeted, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby”, a reference to US politicians’ support for Israel, implying that Jewish money was behind US support for Israel. That same month she invoked another anti-Semitic trope of dual loyalty of American Jews to Israel when she said of her critics: “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

The Democratic house leadership accused Omar of “engaging in deeply offensive anti-Semitic tropes”. The next day she apol­ogised, saying: “I am grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes.”

But Omar’s biggest gaffe was to use a form of words that implied she was flippant about the 9/11 terror attacks of 2001. She said the Council of American-Islamic Relations “was founded after 9/11 because they recognised that because some people did something that we were all starting to lose access to our civil liberties”. The comments created a storm of protest, with the New York Post running a front-page picture of the burning twin towers with the headline: “Here’s your something. 2977 people dead by terrorism”.

Trump said this week: “When she talked about the World Trade Centre being knocked down, ‘some people’, you remember the famous ‘some people’. These are people who in my opinion hate our country.”

Omar also has rankled conservatives by arguing that America was not the large-hearted nation that gave shelter to her family but was instead a country that had failed to live up to its lofty ideals in the way it treated immigrants, refugees and minorities such as herself.

“I feel it necessary for me to speak about that promise that’s not kept,” she says. This has angered people such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who said last week: “How did Ilhan Omar respond to the remarkable gift we gave her? She scolded us and called us names.”

Like Omar, AOC’s high public profile is at least partly explained by the intense coverage she gets from her opponents such as those at Fox News where she is a favourite target of commentators.

With her telegenic looks, highly quotable comments and massive online following, AOC is afforded much more attention than other congressional Democrats. Many in the party’s left wing cheered the New Yorker for her attacks on Amazon, which played a part in the company’s decision not to build its second headquarters in New York, even though critics claimed that decision cost the city an estimated 25,000 jobs. Her 70 per cent tax policy and her Green New Deal — a policy that fails to explain how it would be funded or what the costs would be for traditional energy industries and jobs — have led Trump to portray her as anti-capitalist.

Trump has lampooned her ­aspirational Green New Deal, which has not been supported by most mainstream Democrats.

“No planes. No energy. When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric,” Trump says. “Darling, darling, is the wind blowing today? I’d like to watch television, darling.”

The third member of The Squad, Tlaib, began her congressional career by saying of Trump: “We’re gonna go in there and impeach the motherf..ker.”

Tlaib is a strident critic of Israel and a supporter of the controversial boycott, divestment and sanctions movement targeting ­Israel. She opposes giving US aid to a “Netanyahu Israel” and supports a one-state solution to the ­Israel-Palestinian conflict, a proposal that has little support on either side of US politics.

“You know, people like us, people like me and Ayanna, Ilhan and Alexandria, we’re reflective of our nation in many ways,” Tlaib says. “Guess what? We know what it feels like to be dehumanised. We know what it feels like to be brown and black in this country.”

Pressley is the least known Squad member but, like the others she is a fierce critic of Trump’s policies on border protection. She says black and brown employees of the US Customs and Border Protection are merely “cogs” in a machine that perpetuates oppression and incarceration of people who “look just like them”.

The issue that saw members of The Squad clash directly with Democrat leader Pelosi was their refusal to join fellow Democrats in supporting a $US4.6 billion ($6.51bn) bill to provide emergency aid to ease suffering on the US-Mexican border. They were the only Democrats in the house to oppose the bill, doing so because they argued the Trump administration would use the money to further oppress migrants rather than help them.

“I don’t believe it was a good idea for Dems to blindly trust the Trump admin when so many kids have died in their custody,” AOC tweeted. “It’s a huge mistake.”

But their decision to oppose such a humanitarian bill while saying there are human rights violations happening at the border has led some to accuse The Squad of being more interested in making a statement than making a difference. Pelosi pointed out that this defeat for the Squad was indicative of its members’ relative power in the ­congress.

“All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world,” Pelosi said. “But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”

A furious AOC hit back, saying: “That public ‘whatever’ is called public sentiment. And wielding the power to shift it is how we actually achieve meaningful change in this country.”

But AOC went too far in her criticism of Pelosi by claiming that her criticism of The Squad amounted to “the explicit singling out of newly elected women of ­colour”. The comment mystified many in Washington given Pelosi’s strong record on race issues and it betrayed AOC’s willingness to use race as a political weapon — something she now accuses Trump of doing.

AOC’s comment triggered a blistering article from The New York Times’ left-leaning columnist Maureen Dowd. “AOC should consider the possibility that people who disagree with her do not disagree with her colour,” Dowd wrote. “The progressives act as though anyone who dares disagree with them is bad. Not wrong, but bad, guilty of some human failing, some impurity that is a moral evil that justifies their venom.”

This is why Trump sees such a political upside in attacking The Squad and portraying their political opposition to him as being anti-American.

Omar denies that The Squad’s campaign against the President’s policies means its members are anti-American. She says their activism is no different from that of any political opponent and that Trump should not try to distort it for his own ends.

“Every single statement that we make is from a place of extreme love for every single person in this country,” she says. “This is the agenda of white nationalists. He (Trump) would like nothing more than to divide our country on race, religion, gender orientation and immigration … this is his plan to pit us against one ­another.”

But Trump clearly has decided that the risk of being labelled a racist in his attacks on The Squad is outweighed by the political benefit of using them to electrify his base ahead of next year’s election.

This week, after four days of fighting with The Squad, he tweeted that one poll showed his approval rating had risen four points to 50 per cent. “Thank you to the vicious young Socialist Congresswomen. America will never buy your act!”

Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia.