Trump tweets a tweet to get the week started.

The “Squad” is a very Racist group of troublemakers who are young, inexperienced, and not very smart. They are pulling the once great Democrat Party far left, and were against humanitarian aid at the Border...And are now against ICE and Homeland Security. So bad for our Country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 22, 2019

"Wearing matching 'Squad' pajamas with 11 bridesmaids I’d never met, for the sake of a perfectly filtered, faux candid photo of us throwing our heads back and laughing..."

"... didn’t seem worth what the room would cost. So how could I say no to a friend I’ve known since we were 16, without becoming persona non grata?... I was uninvited to the long bachelorette weekend in Spain, and told, via WhatsApp, that I was no longer a bridesmaid. This left me $675 in the hole for what I had already spent on a trip I was now banned from, including a nonrefundable airline ticket...."

From "Go Broke or Go Home Bachelorette Parties/What happens when friends are consumed by wanting their bachelorette parties to be picture perfect at any cost? Credit cards are maxed out and debt rises. Instagram wedding envy wins the day" by Rhiannon Picton-James, published in the NYT on July 16th.

Interesting to see the disparaging use of "Squad." On July 15th, I was asking about the origin of the term "squad" to refer to the set of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna S. Pressley. It had popped into the national discourse through Nancy Pelosi, who'd seemed to be trying to get the group under control. In my effort to understand the term, I checked out Urban Dictionary and found 2 definitions that help understand the disparagement intended by Nancy Pelosi and Rhiannon Picton-James:

"Crew, posse, gang: an informal group of individuals with a common identity and a sense of solidarity. The term is a bit flashy and is more likely to be heard in hip-hop lyrics than in spoken conversation"/"A word overused by teenagers that think they're ghetto to describe their clique of friends"/"A dumb word only used by white middle schoolers in suburban areas to describe their group of friends and try to sound ghetto. It doesnt make them sound ghetto, but actually increases their whiteness."

And here's a piece from Vox on July 17th, "How 4 congresswomen came to be called 'the Squad'/The term is making headlines, but Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib have their own definition."

The crudeness and the precision of the "Send her back" chant — heard at Trump's rally last night in Greenville, NC.

Trump fans eventually break out in "send her back!" chants directed toward Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee who serves in Congress who Trump viciously smeared. pic.twitter.com/LX3eAEkfci

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 17, 2019

The crudeness: Trump, in his original tweet and later statements, was asking about the failure to leave and noting their option to leave. They are free. "Send her back" is not a question. It's an imperative. And it's not about the individual's option to leave. Someone — the group as a whole, Trump as President? — is told to do the sending, which sounds like an overriding of the individual's freedom — a deportation. Trump hasn't ever talked about kicking a Congresswoman out of the country. So the crowd has gone beyond Trump's idea and re-understood it as a harsh exercise of power against the will of the individual and in retribution for exercising the most basic American freedom, the freedom to speak in criticism of governmental power.

The precision: They said "her," limiting themselves to Ilhan Omar as Trump was talking about her. Trump's tweets were addressed at "'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)." He didn't name anybody individually, but he used the plural, and it's been assumed that he was talking about the set of 4 Congresswomen who have grouped themselves together, the so-called "Squad" of Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, and Tlaib. Once you make that assumption, Trump looks like he's made an assumption — that nonwhite people came from another country. From there, Trump was open to accusations of racism (which, of course, he got, like mad). But only Omar is an immigrant. By chanting "Send her back" (and not "Send them back"), the crowd arrived at a greater accuracy than Trump's original tweet.

Is the chant "Send her back" a good one, going forward, for Trump rallies? Check all that apply.

Yes! It's got a "Lock her up" rhythm.

Yes! It arose, spontaneously, from the people.

Yes! It pointedly antagonizes the very people who have been so unfair to Trump.

Yes! It expresses something true: Omar deserves to be kicked out.

Yes. Alinsky said it best: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

Yes. It's thrilling to see one individual singled out and scared.

No. It's too cruel to bear down so intensely on a relatively powerless individual.

No. It will elicit empathy for Omar.

No. It will play into the perception that Trumpsters are fascistic.

No. It's antagonistic to freedom of speech values.

No. Too much static with arguments for doing something about *illegal* immigration.

No. Chants should be positive. Trump will do better if the crowd has an upbeat expression.

 

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"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 free pass..."

"... and a big embrace from the Democrat Party. 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. Why isn’t the House voting to rebuke the filthy and hate laced things they have said? Because they are the Radical Left, and the Democrats are afraid to take them on. Sad!"

Tweeted Trump, just now.

1. He's a master of Tweet-talk — he's tweet-talking us — but he makes language mistakes that I would edit out. He writes, "the petrified Dems run for the hills," but if you are petrified — the dead metaphor is turned to stone — you can't move, so you can't run. (The OED gives this example from Jack London's "White Fang": "The cub was in a frenzy of terror, yet he lay without movement or sound, frozen, petrified into immobility, to all appearances dead.")

2. But "petrified" is a slightly unusual word, so it works as a stimulant.

3. The implicit subject is that Nancy Pelosi is going forward with a vote to condemn Trump for his "Why don't they go back..." tweets (which we discussed here yesterday). Trump is certainly not backing down. He doesn't do that, and how could that possibly work? If he ever withdrew a remark and apologized, his antagonists would react by demanding another concession. So he plunges forward, in attack mode: "Why isn’t the House voting to rebuke the filthy and hate laced things they have said?" You don't like what I said, look at what you said. And on and on.

4. A return of the iconic "Sad!"

5. The key line is: "Because they are the Radical Left, and the Democrats are afraid to take them on." He's tying all the Democrats to a small, vocal group that the Democrats don't want as their brand. He's taunting them: You can't even distance yourself from this small group, within your own party, for your own sake. Implied: How can you be trusted to defend America?

6. Look at the arc of emotion in Trump's brief statement: It begins with hate (the "spewing" of "vile, hateful, and disgusting things") and proceeds to love ("a big embrace") and then to anger ("shouting of the F...word") and then to fear ("petrified Dems... afraid to take them on"), and finally sadness ("Sad!"). The hate and anger are projected outward from the small subgroup of Democrats. The love and fear are experienced within the fragile body of mainstream Democrats. And the sadness is Trump's idea of the appropriate reaction from anyone watching.

7. Look at the narrative of action: the small subgroup of Democrats spews. The more sensible Democrats have one strong action — the big hug — and the rest is weakness — frozen into immobility or running. Yes, there's that implied activity, voting to condemn Trump, but he doesn't mention it. His defense is to go on the offense. Yet he assumes the position of standing back and observing and finding it sad.

Why are Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna S. Pressley called "The Squad"?

I keep seeing the term without an explanation of its origin. It wasn't easy to Google — especially with all the clutter having to do with Trump's recent tweets, which we're already discussing here. This post is just about the term "The Squad."

I decided to search the NYT archive for the 4 names plus "the squad" and to look at the oldest  all of the returns. The oldest article was "For All the Talk of a Tea Party of the Left, Moderates Emerge as a Democratic Power" (June 30):

While the House’s liberal superstars are adept at promoting their progressive positions and routinely generate headlines for breaking with the party line, they have not made a habit of lobbying their colleagues to defy Ms. Pelosi en masse. Last week, the foursome known as The Squad...

No explanation of who started that term and why.

The second-oldest is "It’s Nancy Pelosi’s Parade/'If the left doesn’t think I’m left enough, so be it,' she told me," a Maureen Dowd column from July 6th.

I asked Pelosi whether...it was jarring to get a bad headline like the one in HuffPost that day — “What The Hell Is Nancy Pelosi Doing?” The article described the outrage of the Squad, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts are known.

The term is not explained in the Dowd column (and isn't used in the HuffPo piece).

Next oldest is "Tensions Between Pelosi and Progressive Democrats of ‘the Squad’ Burst Into Flame" (July 9th):

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said they have no following in Congress. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York shot back that she and three of her fellow liberal freshmen, darlings of the left known collectively as “the squad,” are wielding the real power in the party.... The contretemps began when Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, asked Ms. Pelosi about the squad’s fury over the border aid package... The squad and its allies argue that they are tapping into the real energy in the Democratic base with their uncompromising and unapologetic stances....

Again, the term is used with no explanation. Further down, we see:

“AOC and The Squad have changed the entire national debate,” said an email rehashing the spat from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which offered a colorful “I STAND WITH AOC” sticker to anyone who donated to their work “electing more AOC’s to Congress.”

That suggests that the women came up with that name for themselves. Why would they do that? Maybe they're taking an epithet and wearing it with pride. I don't know.

There's also this other usage of "squad" in that article:

“This is an inevitable tension between a few progressives with one priority, which is their ideology, and a speaker with many priorities, including preserving the majority in the House, electing a Democratic president against Trump, and responding to the consensus of her caucus,” said Steve Israel, a Democrat and former representative of New York. “To the extent that it distracts from Donald Trump and becomes a circular firing squad among Democrats, it can be lethal.”

I am going to guess that talk of a circular firing squad — there's been a lot of that — led to calling the 4 Congresswomen "The Squad." That would explain why the explanation of the origin is suppressed. Too violent. Too much like a death threat.

Consulting Urban Dictionary, I can see that the use of the term could be experienced as racist: "Crew, posse, gang: an informal group of individuals with a common identity and a sense of solidarity. The term is a bit flashy and is more likely to be heard in hip-hop lyrics than in spoken conversation"/"A word overused by teenagers that think they're ghetto to describe their clique of friends"/"A dumb word only used by white middle schoolers in suburban areas to describe their group of friends and try to sound ghetto. It doesnt make them sound ghetto, but actually increases their whiteness."

How embarrassing! Embarrassingness increases the likelihood that this is the real origin of the term, since the source of the term isn't talked about.

I get the feeling Maureen Dowd heard the term and thought it was hip/cute/clever and she went public with it without understanding the problem with it. Now, they're stuck with it and vulnerable if anyone is ever curious enough to ask about the origin.

ADDED: From Elle Magazine in 2015: "Meet Hillary Clinton's Girl Squad/On Wednesdays, they wear pantsuits." Also, from 2018: "What Happened to Taylor Swift's Girl Squad?/Taylor Swift practically invented #SquadGoals, and now she's traveling solo inside her own suitcase. What gives?"