The Sickening Calculation of Trump's Attacks on the Squad

By this point it is dispiritingly clear that the infamous tweets Trump sent admonishing the quartet of Progressive women of color collectively known as The Squad to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came”, solve all the problems there, and THEN return to our country and show “us” how it’s done was no mere staggeringly racist outburst. 

This was not a simple matter of Trump acting out in a manner horrifyingly racist and sexist even by his almost inconceivably low standards. Trump was being cynical and hateful and calculating with these abhorrent attacks but he was also being uncharacteristically strategic.

Trump has decided to rile up his base by making The Squad, but more specifically Ilhan Omar, the face and identity of the Democratic Party. In a way it does not matter who gets the Democratic presidential nomination for 2020 because Trump will be running against Omar as much as the actual nominee. 

They say politicians should never answer the questions they’re asked, but rather the questions they want to be asked, and to answer. Accordingly, Trump will turn every question, every issue, every debate, into a referendum on who loves America more: a famous white Christian businessman who makes an elaborate show of being the world’s greatest patriot, surrounding himself with the kind of red, white and blue kitsch that would embarrass Yacov Smirnoff, or a hajib-wearing, brown-skinned Muslim woman who hates America, and Israel, and flagrantly flaunts her contempt for capitalism and our way of life and also, for good measure is married to her brother, the way “those people” sometimes are.

Trump will turn the election into a massive Patriotism-Off, a war of words as maudlin and grotesquely over-the-top as anything in the ridiculously hagiographic cartoons of Ben Garrison. With the help of Republicans, he’ll depict Omar Ilhan as the face, voice and entirety of the Democratic party and ask voters whether they want Texas-sized Christmas bonuses or for Christianity to be outlawed once Ilhan succeeds in her goal of bringing Sharia Law to the United States. 

It’s a testament to just how ugly and shameless Trump is going to be in nakedly appealing to the xenophobia and Islamophobia that has powered his entire political career that Trump saying  “a lot of talk about the fact that (Omar) was married to her brother,” and that he was “sure that somebody will be looking at that” barely made news at all. It barely caused a ripple. The press barely seems to have noticed that THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES SAID A MUSLIM CRITIC OF HIS ADMINISTRATION WAS MARRIED TO HER BROTHER, that her marriage to her brother is a “fact” inspiring “a lot of talk.” 

If Obama were to publicly state that a lot of people are saying that Melania Trump, as part of her weird Christian religion, secretly married her own brother to get citizenship, Republicans would be calling for him to be shunned from society for having the unforgivable audacity to even suggest something that transparently ridiculous, slanderous and wrong. 

But when Trump, as part of an ongoing, multifaceted campaign to smear the entire squad as America-hating extremists, says something like that the response is a shrug and “Yeah, he says stuff like that all the time.” 

Trump’s “patriotism” is one hundred percent performative. It’s a matter of embracing empty symbols like standing up for the Pledge of Allegiance and the idea that Jesus angrily demands that Americans say “Merry Christmas” and ONLY “Merry Christmas” during December or the terrorists and commies will have won. 

Trump’s bogus conception of loving your country is a matter of empty, self-aggrandizing gestures but he’s such a hateful, contemptuous moron that he can’t even get those right. For example, if you’re a draft-dodging Republican who gushes about “his” generals maybe don’t insult John McCain, a Republican who suffered the trials of Job in a POW camp, on the basis that he let himself get captured and then tortured by the Vietcong like a total loser.

If Trump was able to convince Republicans that McCain’s brand of patriotism was somehow inferior to his showy but incredibly empty and transparently hypocritical variety of America-loving, then he’ll undoubtedly be able to convince lots of scared Republicans, and independents and undecideds as well, that a woman he has spent the last few years conditioning the public and his cult to see as an enemy out to destroy our country is a threat only he can protect our country from. 

Trump has spent years warning about “trojan horses”, evil terroristic Muslims or Mexican gangsters masquerading as immigrants with dignity and children and basic rights. In Omar he has the ultimate “Trojan Horse”, an evil Muslim Other bent on our nation’s destruction who has fiendishly taken advantage of our country’s excessive freedoms in order to rise to a place where she can criticize a white, Christian, flag-waving Republican President, and consequent threaten everything we hold dear. 

Trump is going to make Democrats either sternly repudiate Omar for all of her imaginary but VERY SERIOUS sins and transgressions or become her in his mind. Trump has tried, with some success, to terrify the populace with the America-hating extremism of folks like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. 

Trump is going to be much more effective scaring people with the prism of a brown-skinned Muslim woman with a relatively young political career already filled with controversy , who WASN’T EVEN BORN IN THE UNITED STATES taking over the Democratic Party and steering our nation into becoming a Muslim theocracy. 

Trump is never going to apologize or change course. Instead, he angrily demands an endless series of apologies and doubles down on his ugliness and bigotry when challenged and confronted. He’s already pretty much gotten away with telling brown-skinned women to “Go Back” to the hellholes from which they ostensibly came. He got away with saying that Ilhan married her brother. 

My fear is that Omar is going to become Trump’s Willie Horton, an all-purpose brown-skinned bogeyman that only he is strong and white and “politically incorrect” enough to call out, face down and ultimately defeat. 

The Donald Trump-Ilhan Omar war is far from over. In many ways it has barely even begun. That is only one of the many almost almost inconceivably depressing aspects of this whole sad affair. 

Trump won’t be satisfied until he has made Omar the most infamous and hated woman in the country. For the sake of democracy and human decency, we can’t let that happen. 

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