‘The Squad’ are right to be angry but they’re playing into Trump’s hands

Attacked: from left, Democratic congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley. The four were all targeted on the basis of skin colour by Donald Trump
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It takes a leader whose own father grew up speaking German in an immigrant family in New York and who has been married to wives from Czech (Ivana) and Slovenian backgrounds (Melania) to embark on a bilious new campaign against political foes, based on the slur that they do not belong in the great melting pot of the United States.

Even by the standards of the Trump trade, the volley of tweets he unleashed were a horror. All were targeted on four Left-wing opponents on the grounds of skin colour. They should, he tweeted, “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.” Only one of the four hails from a country outside the US but the message could not be clearer — non-white Americans are here on sufferance.

Arriving in New York in the midst of the tweetstorm has been a sobering reminder of why Trump is both appalling but also such a hard quarry for opponents to skewer. For a politician unskilled in carrying out the duties of the presidency (a recurrent theme in the leaked cables of Sir Kim Darroch, the now departed British ambassador), Trump is cynically nimble when under fire.

Criticised for the racist implications of telling those born or long-resident in the US to go somewhere else, the President moved the conversation to territory where he knows the Left are vulnerable to the charge of dividing opinion across the centre ground. This was his target and the later missive makes it clear. “If Democrats want to unite around the foul language [and] racist hatred ... of these very unpopular, unrepresentative Congresswomen, it will be interesting to see how it plays out.”

The storm over the language and racial insinuation of the attacks has secured a brief suspension of hostility among Democrats, who are split on the electoral risks of “the Squad” — as the grouping of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley are known in Congress.

Anne McElvoy

Nancy Pelosi, the powerful House Speaker, has made it tartly clear that she saw them as a self-regarding tribe whose Left-wing base and out-on-a-limb policy platforms risk endangering a resurgence of “mighty moderates”. That said, a wide field of moderate presidential hopefuls, who’ve been exerting themselves to find points of difference while sounding largely the same, haven’t looked so mighty. This is why the response to the latest salvo has to be carefully calibrated.

Responding to fire with fire is only half the answer. I met up with a prominent Hispanic-American friend in business who observed that she was torn about whether to join the chorus of outrage — understandable outrage from families in despair at the message of sneering alienation the White House is sending young Americans of colour about their place in society. “But then I grip myself,” she reflected, “and think this is what he wants: more shouting, more anger. That’s his A-game.”

"For a politician unskilled in carrying out the duties of the presidency, Trump is nimble when under fire"

Uncertainty is an emotion Trump produces in his enemies. It took a day until Democrats calibrated their response. Pelosi issued a strongly worded condemnation and said there would be a vote recording the responses of Congress to the matter. Any hint that she was failing to support Congresswomen attacked on the grounds of colour would cause an escalation of bad blood.

Amid the noise, Trump is honing in on attitudes among “The Squad” which are genuinely unwelcome to centrists. They touch on a question which troubles democracies that are finding political language has coarsened: should anti-populists adopt the same tendency to exaggerate as their foes, or practise their old restraint, which ensured they got bulldozered in the first place?

When the President describes as “vicious” language used by some of the group he is not entirely wrong, since Tlaib pledged to “impeach the mother f***er”. But he discounts his own vulgarities: another hint that what is OK for white Americans is not OK for others.

Yet there are, however, inconvenient grains of truth that the centre-Left needs to be wary of dismissing. The first is that “Squad” is itself divisive. Had Trump not stolen the limelight, the focus of internal strife this week would have been Ayanna Pressley’s defiant defence of identity politics as the motor of her beliefs — a dividing line with many former Clintonites, never mind swing voters. Referring to the President as the “occupant” of the White House, as Pressley did yesterday, might seem like a neat jibe but it ignores the fact that he won an election to get there — the only way the Democrats can reoccupy it.

The weaknesses of the new Left offer ample target practice for Trump. On anti-Semitism, he has Ilhan Omar in his sights. Like many caught up in similar rows in the Labour Party, Omar has been undiscerning in her outlook on Israel and had to apologise for tweets suggesting the US-Israel public-affairs lobby was buying influence. If we are alive to racist tropes about non-whites, it is fair to point out that the “Jews pulling strings using money” is an old racist accusation.

As the liberal Haaretz newspaper noted yesterday, Israel is rapidly becoming the “go-to wedge issue” of the 2020 White House campaign. That is ironic, as it is two years since Trump’s boast of “the ultimate deal” between Israelis and Palestinians, with no progress on offer. So in one sense the Squad are right to claim a volcanic presidency is deploying eruptions to mask a lack of progress. But that is not the same as having the self-knowledge on how to address the attacks.

Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s savvy aide, once told me that in her years in Democratic politics, she had seen no one define an electoral race or “set the conversation” as ruthlessly as Trump did in the 2016 campaign. Until Democrats can agree on what conversation they want to have with Americans and what the ideological limits of their project are, the grand master of discord will keep dishing lies — and make the running.

  • Anne McElvoy is senior editor at The Economist