Ilhan Omar, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley are four Democratic freshman members of Congress from safe urban seats. All have gotten crosswise of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi because they have an appetite for publicity that is not traditionally tolerated in freshmen, and because some of their ideas look disconcerting to the kind of middle class suburban voters in swing districts who gave the Democrats a majority of the House in 2018 and whose support the party may need in 2020. A Democrat who doesn’t agree with them might consider the four to be presumptuous, provincial and naïve, or even worse, but that’s normal intra-party squabbling.
President Donald Trump decided he could use this quarrel among the opposition to make a broader point about who deserves to speak and be heard in this country. Over last weekend, he tweeted that the four women should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” When that tweet drew widespread criticism as racist and nativist, the president doubled down and called the four women enemies of the United States who should apologize to him and to the country. After the crowd at his latest rally chanted “Send Her Back” at the mention of Omar’s name, the president tweeted that they were “great people.”
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