Trump’s and Miller’s Attacks on ‘The Squad’
President Donald Trump and his top immigration adviser continue to criticize four progressive Democratic congresswomen known as “the squad,” but some of their claims twist the women’s words.
We’ve dealt with a couple of these assertions before, including a false claim that Rep. Ilhan Omar has expressed pride for al Qaeda. But Trump and senior adviser Stephen Miller have pointed to other instances in which they claim the lawmakers expressed anti-American or anti-Semitic remarks. Below, we present some of these claims and a fuller context of the comments made by the congresswomen.
The president sparked controversy with tweets on July 14 telling the four lawmakers — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar — to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested [countries] from which they came.”
The controversy continued when, during Trump’s extended criticism of Omar at a rally in North Carolina on July 17, audience members began chanting, “Send her back.” The next day, Trump said he was “not happy when I heard that chant.” He claimed that he tried to quell the chants by “speaking very quickly.” But the video shows he did not.
Since then, Trump has kept up his attacks, saying recently of the congresswomen, “they’re very bad for our country” and tweeting that they are “a very Racist group of troublemakers who are young, inexperienced, and not very smart.” Miller went on “Fox News Sunday” to defend the president’s words. The two continued, however, to back up their criticism with some claims that distort what the lawmakers actually said. In other cases, more context may be helpful to readers.
The ‘Garbage’ Quote
: Ocasio-Cortez “call[s] our country and our people ‘garbage.'” — “She’s saying
