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President Trump has settled on at least one tactic for the 2020 presidential campaign.
Part of his Keep American Great strategy will make The Squad — the quartet of four radical leftist congresswomen given to anti-American, anti-Christian rants — the face of the Democratic Party.
Thus has the campaign released an advertisement that lets the four politicians speak for themselves.
In order of appearance, The Squad’s members are Ilhan Omar, who represents the 5th district of Minnesota; Ayanna Pressly, 7th-Massachusetts; Rashida Tlaib, 13th-Michigan, and Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez, 14th-New York.
The Ad
The ad (shown below) features Trump speaking about each one of the four, then segues into two of their outrageous acts or statements.
First, Trump notes that Omar, a Somali refugee who ridicules Christians and married her brother to commit immigration fraud, is friendly with Islamic State, or ISIS.
“She pleaded for compassion for ISIS recruits attempting to join the terrorist organization,” Trump says, referring to a letter Omar wrote to a judge on behalf of the terrorists. “She was looking for compassion.”
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The ad then shows the faces of those for whom Omar penned this eyewash:
As you undoubtedly deliberate with great caution the sentencing of nine recently convicted Somali-American men, I bring to your attention the ramifications of sentencing young men who made a consequential mistake to decades in federal prison. Incarcerating 20-year-old men for 30 or 40 years is essentially a life sentence. Society will have no expectations of the to be 50 or 60-year-old released prisoners; it will view them with distrust and revulsion. Such punitive measures not only lack efficacy, they inevitably create an environment in which extremism can flourish, aligning with the presupposition of terrorist recruitment: “Americans do not accept you and continue to trivialize your value. Instead of being a nobody, be a martyr.”
The best deterrent to fanaticism is a system of compassion. We must alter our attitude and approach; if we truly want to affect change, we should refocus our efforts on inclusion and rehabilitation.
“And she looks down with contempt on the hard working Americans by saying ignorance is pervasive in many parts of this country,” Trump continues.
A video clip shows Omar saying almost exactly that: “Ignorance is very pervasive in this country.”
Omar said the same thing in May during an interview with The Nation:
And ignorance really is pervasive in many parts of this country. And as someone who was raised by educators, I really like to inform people about things that they might be ignorant to, willingly or unwillingly.
She has also tweeted it.
Next Trump recalls Tlaib’s unhinged rant in a bar. Tlaib, he says, “used the F-word to describe the presidency, and your president. That’s not nice, even for me.”
“We’re gonna impeach the motherf****er,” she said, a sentiment followed by video of a ranting, raving Tlaib’s ejection from then-candidate Trump’s speech to the Detroit Economic Club in August 2016.
The next squad member in Trump’s crosshairs is Pressley. Trump observed that “she thinks that people with the same color all need to think the same. She said, ‘we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be brown voices, we don’t black faces that don’t wanna be a black voice’ … Can you imagine if I said that.”
Trump’s rendition of Pressley’s overt appeal to racial ideology and groupthink is nearly verbatim.
Last comes Ocasio-Cortez, whose utterances have quickly become the stuff of legend and satire.
Trump: “Cortez said that illegal immigrants are more American than any person who seeks to keep them out ever will be. Can you believe that. That’s what she’s saying.”
Here is what Ocasio-Cortez said in her commentary about President Trump’s national address about illegal immigration on January 8:
The women and children on that border that are trying to seek refuge and seek opportunity in the United States of America with nothing but the shirt on their backs are acting more American than any person who seeks to keep them out ever will be.
The ad then features Ocasio-Cortez, who was a bartender before she became a congresswoman, uttering this: “Yeah, you know, if that’s what radical means, call me a radical.”
Worries About 2020
For some time, more moderate Democrats have been worried about reprising their crushing 49-state loss in 1972, when Richard Nixon received 520 electoral votes and more than 60 percent of the popular vote against hard leftist George McGovern.
The Squad is pushing the party further into radical territory. They make McGovern look moderate.
That does not bode well for Democrats in 2020.
Image: screenshot from YouTube video
