Talking to reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast Thursday, Emmer said that the “Squad” of progressive House Democrats — Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — is going to play a starring role in Congress during the 2020 election.
“You should call them the ‘Leadership Squad’ since they are the Speaker, in fact,” Emmer said. “The rest of their conference should be called the new red army of socialists.”
Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley and Tlaib have made headlines over the past week after being the targets of a series of racist tweets by President Donald Trump. Trump claimed the lawmakers are from “corrupt” and “inept” foreign countries, even though all but one was born in the U.S. He also suggested they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done.”
Trump has defended the tirade amid widespread backlash and Republicans have largely failed to condemn the president’s remarks. Only four GOP congressmen voted with Democrats this week on a House resolution criticizing Trump’s behavior.
Trump has also found support in his conservative base. During a Wednesday night rally in North Carolina, the president’s audience began chanting “send her back” in reference to Omar. The Minnesota lawmaker was born in Somalia and immigrated to America as a child with her family.
When asked about the chant, Emmer said that “there’s no place for that kind of talk” and he didn’t agree with it. But the Republican continued to defend Trump, saying that there’s “not a racist bone in this president’s body” — a nearly verbatim restatement of a defense made by the president himself earlier in the week.
The “Squad” responded to Trump’s racist tirade in a press conference on Tuesday. The group of Democrats slammed the president for his “complete hypocrisy” and accused him of politically benefiting from dividing the country.
“When people say, ‘If you say a negative thing about the policies in this country, you hate this country,’ to me it sort of speaks to the hypocrisy,” Omar said. “When this president ran and until today, he talked about everything that was wrong in this country and how he was going to make it great. And so for him to condemn us and to say we are un-American for wanting to work hard to make this country be the country we all deserve to live in, it’s complete hypocrisy.”
Pelosi also pushed back hard against Trump’s comments. During the resolution vote on Tuesday, Pelosi called on both Republicans and Democrats to condemn the president’s racist tweets. “To do anything less would be a shocking rejection of our values and a shameful abdication of our oath of office to protect the American people,” she said.
But Pelosi has publicly squabbled with the progressive “Squad” in recent weeks. She’s downplayed their popularity online and in the media, noting that despite their social media reach they only amount to four votes in Congress. Ocasio-Cortez fired back, suggesting that Pelosi was “singling out” the group because they are newly elected women of color.
President Trump has tried to cast the progressive lawmakers as the new face of the Democratic Party in his re-election bid. During a campaign speech in Iowa last month, Trump said that the Democrats were becoming “more and more unhinged and more and more extreme.”
When asked about Trump’s efforts to tie the Democratic Party to socialism, Pelosi said she was not going to “waste” her time discussing the president.
“With all due respect, let’s not waste our time on that,” Pelosi said during a press conference on Wednesday. “We are not having him set our agenda. We are setting our own agenda.”
