--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today's show comes to you courtesy of support from our good friends at the Illinois Office of Tourism.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: They'd just like to remind you that it is summer in the United States. People are traveling and you don't want to sleep on the great state of Illinois. They got Chicago. They got Wayne's World. They got that wine country. They got that Shawnee National Forest. They promise you that the feeling you'll have in Illinois is amazing. Are you up for amazing? Enjoy Illinois.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ellen Nilsson, it's been an embarrassing week for the United States of America, and you have been covering it. Indeed I have. Lucky me. Where does it begin, Ella?
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: All of it? We have to go all the way back to last week, a.k.a. 10 years ago. Mm. So this all starts not so much even with Trump versus Democrats, but it starts with Democrats versus Democrats, specifically a group of progressive Democrats in the House. The so-called squad. The so-called squad. And this is Congresswomen Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. And these are four freshmen, all women of color, who are definitely seen as being on kind of the furthest left wing of the party.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They've been co-sponsoring a bunch of progressive legislation with some 2020 candidates, it should be noted. So they're kind of seen as this brain trust of the left in the House. But there was kind of this fight that erupted last week and, you know, even goes back a little further than that over this immigration border aid funding bill that passed the House.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: And progressives, including these four, as a larger group of progressives, were arguing with Nancy Pelosi that they're needed in order to pass this funding. They wanted to make sure that there were sort of these strict rules that the Trump administration had to follow for how they're treating migrants at the border. The squad wanted to make sure that they weren't funding harsh detention practices further.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Exactly. Yes. They wanted to make sure that if they sent this money, that there were some rules and some regulations attached to it, that they wanted to kind of put some teeth into it. That didn't happen. So there was a lot of fighting that broke out. Ultimately, Pelosi supports a funding bill that doesn't have so-called conditions, right?
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Yes, exactly. So this all kind of culminated in this kind of intra-party fighting over the last few weeks. And kind of the culmination of it was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, this guy named Saikot Chakrabarty, tweeted out something where he basically compared current moderate Democrats to Southern Democrats in the 1940s who enabled segregationist policies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, you know, pretty charged language and language that really pissed House leadership off and pissed off moderate Democrats. So there was this big meeting where Pelosi was basically like, hey, guys, like, don't tweet at each other. Like, let's just like if we have internal disagreements, let's talk about it. But let's not like wage this battle online.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Then last weekend, late on Friday night, the official House Democrats account tweeted about Saikot Chakrabarty, AOC's chief of staff, who is this guy and why is he explicitly singling out a Native American woman of color in reference to this other congresswoman and then said, like, keep her name out of your mouth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it was like this direct attack on AOC's chief of staff. From the party. From the official Twitter account of House Democrats. Yeah. It was nasty public infighting. And the president noticed.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Yeah. So on Sunday, Trump unleashes this tweet storm where he says these four congresswomen, the squad, quote, originally came from countries whose governments are complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then he says they should, quote, go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came, then come back and show us how it's done.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Important to note here that three out of the four congresswomen are from the United States, born and raised. Born in America. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was born in Somalia. Yes. And is a naturalized citizen. And is a naturalized citizen. Yes. Legal, naturalized citizen.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which, of course, you know, a lot of people seized on this of like, you're talking about four women of color telling them to go back to where they came from. That is a racist trope. Yes, we people of color are familiar. Yes, yeah, exactly.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: And it was kind of this weird thing where in his original final tweet says he thinks that Nancy Pelosi would, quote, be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Pelosi immediately tweets out, you know, Trump's idea of making America great again is making America white again.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: And House Democrats waste no time in saying these tweets are racist, they're xenophobic. And soon after, say, we're going to release a formal resolution condemning the president's language on the House floor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Poof, this fight between Democrats is now gone because they have something larger to focus on. And the president, instead of walking any of this back, just doubles down in like a press conference on Monday.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Yeah, exactly. Like, why would he, you know, he's Donald Trump. Why would he apologize for any of this stuff? He thinks he's right.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It doesn't concern you that many people saw that tweet as racist and that white nationalist groups are finding common cause with you on that point.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: It doesn't concern me because many people agree with me. And all I'm saying, they want to leave, they can leave now. And it was crazy to me because I was actually on C-SPAN on Monday morning. And there were so many people calling in being like well I agree with President Trump Like if these women don they just go back to where they came from If you don like this country if you don like it the way you were founded why are you here You have the option to leave. We don't keep you here. We're not a communist nation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was kind of like, oh, like, what? Right. To all the C-SPAN callers and everyone else out there who thinks the president has a point here, that the squad shouldn't be talking smack on America, The Daily Show made this montage for you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The United States has become the laughingstock in a whipping post for the rest of the world. We don't have strength in our country. Our country has no spirit. Our country has no gravitas. We're a deader nation. We're broke. We don't know what we're doing as a country. Putin's a killer. Why you think our country's so innocent? You think our country's so innocent?
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape. And the crime. And the gangs. And the drugs. Poverty and violence at home. War and destruction abroad. We don't have a country anymore. The American dream is dead.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The squad responds Monday night in their own press conference. What do they say? Each one came up and talked one at a time.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: So we can either continue to enable this president and report on the bile of garbage that comes out of his mouth, or we can hold him accountable to his crimes. And I should note, so Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib both pretty explicitly called for Trump to be impeached.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Presley kind of had this interesting thing where she kind of said, Our squad is big. Our squad includes any person committed to building a more equitable and just world. And that is the work that we want to get back to.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: And given the size of this squad and this great nation, we cannot, we will not be silenced.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think kind of trying to make it less seem like we are this group of four people just kind of alienating everybody and focusing on kind of the larger inclusive points. They all were saying. This president does not know how to make the argument that Americans do not deserve health care. He does not know how to defend his policies. So what he does is attack us personally. Because that's easier for him to do, essentially.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Right. It's easier to run against these four than to run against Warren or Harris even.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What action does the House ultimately take against the president? They don't end up going full impeachment, right?
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: What Congress decides to do is release a resolution condemning Trump's words as being xenophobic. And they specifically say these comments from the White House are disgraceful and disgusting. And these comments are racist.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the important distinction that they were trying to make is saying we're not calling the president racist. We're calling his language racist.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: How shameful to hear him continue to defend those offensive words, words that we have all heard and repeat not only about our members, but about countless others.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But this like blew up into this whole other fight on the floor of the House this week where when Speaker Pelosi was introducing this bill and saying, you know, we urge all of our colleagues to condemn the president's racist language, House Republicans basically wanted her to take back her words and they tried to basically block her from being able to speak the rest of the day.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Where exactly did the Republican Party in the House, in the Senate, come down on the language the president used, on the president doubling down on that language later?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Some did condemn his language and said that it was unophobic or racist. But many more kind of tried to put it back on the squad itself and be like, Well, we all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of communists. They hate Israel. They hate our own country. the four horsewomen of the apocalypse. Now they're entitled to their opinion, but I'm entitled to say that they're whack jobs.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: For most of the week, it felt like this was just mostly self-contained political fight in Washington, like an inside the beltway war about serious things like racism, like immigration.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then last night, there was this rally the president had in North Carolina, and it really seemed to escalate.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: So Representative Omar blamed the United States for the terrorist attacks on our country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, so Trump was at a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, and he was talking about Ilhan Omar. Omar has a history of launching vicious anti-Semitic screams.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: And unprompted, the audience started chanting, send her back. Send her back! Send her back! Send her back!
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like, I saw a little girl behind the president chanting, send her back, like a little white girl in a Make America Great Again hat.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Yeah. It just felt so bad for our country. Yeah, it felt pretty gross and disgusting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the president, of course, doesn't stop it. He sort of, like, steps off the mic for a second to take it all in, and then just continues right on with, and, you know, Omar said negative things about Israel. She talked about the evil Israel and it's all about the Benjamins.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Not a good thing to say. Yeah. We all know why Omar is being singled out explicitly, right? She's from Somalia originally. She's Muslim. She wears a headscarf. She is kind of like the easiest target for the president of the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you know she she certainly has kind of some of her rhetoric has become a flashpoint before in Washington.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: And the other thing is, you know, Trump earlier in the day had like openly questioned whether she had married her brother at one point.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, yeah, last night kind of felt like this like new low for the country. And I feel like it's going to get worse before it gets better.
--:-- Adam Serwer: I think this send-her-back chant from last night is actually a defining moment for American democracy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I talked to him after the break. I'm Sean Rameswaram from This Is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, people may be getting tired of sunset photos because of Instagram or whatever, But the other day, my friend Amy texted me a photo of a sunset that looked like Narnia-esque, you know, just idyllic. Pinks, oranges, reds, purples. It seems to be on some sort of river. And there's some, like, daisies popping off in the foreground on some beautiful riverside grasses. There's some silhouetted trees. It's got truly everything.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it turned out the photo was on a calendar. The photos from Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge. Guess where it is? In the amazing state of Illinois.
--:-- Ellen Nilsson: Amy's caption in her text was, Amazing Illinois. The point of this story is, it's amazing what you can find in Illinois. Visit enjoyillinois.com and find your Illinois because who are we kidding? Everyone's up for amazing.
--:-- Adam Serwer: Some of the outrage this week at President Trump's racist tweets surprised me, not because it's misplaced, but because this man used to recreationally promote the idea that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and because he essentially launched his political career saying that the Mexicans coming through the border were rapists.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you think people have forgotten all that?
--:-- Adam Serwer: I don't think people have forgotten it, but I think there is a distinction. People may have made, which is that, you know, when I talked to Trump supporters during the campaign, they said, oh, well, those things he was saying, those were about illegal immigrants, not legal immigrants.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so it's different.
--:-- Adam Serwer: And I think the president is not making a distinction between legal immigrants or illegal immigrants or even immigrants and citizens who happen to be people of color. He is telling all of them that they do not belong here in the United States because of their political views, which itself is an argument that the citizenship of non-white people in the United States is conditional.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I guess something sort of incredible about this week is that while the president himself has been issuing these racist tweets and sanctioning racism, he's also arguing that Representative Omar is the racist.
--:-- Adam Serwer: Is that par for the course as well here?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, look, that's really typical. I mean, when you go back to the first immigration law, you know, only allows free white persons to become naturalized.
--:-- Adam Serwer: So from the beginning, we're talking about a country that says we're all created equal, but then creates a rule of citizenship that only allows white people to be citizens.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Throughout American history, that contradiction has provoked a kind of cognitive dissonance in an effort to reconcile. We're all created equal with actually white people are more equal than other people.
--:-- Adam Serwer: When the Civil War was over, the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stevens, who gave this extremely famous speech, how the cornerstone of the Confederacy is African servitude, the belief that the African is not equal to the white man.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then after the war, he's in jail, he's locked up, he's writing a diary and he says, you know, I don't have any problem with black people at all.
--:-- Adam Serwer: The story that reported that speech was fake news. The Civil War was really just about individual freedom and states' rights.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then when you look at, you know, the civil rights movement, white people in the South were saying, actually, it's the federal government who's the fascist and we just want our freedom and our liberty.
--:-- Adam Serwer: And this is not about racism at all. In fact, we love black people. The champions of white nationalism in American history always invert the conflict so that they are the victims when, in fact, they are the ones who are trying to exclude people from the polity on the basis of race or religion.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A lot of what we've seen this week has felt familiar to recent or more bygone history. But what happened last night felt different to me. It felt dangerous.
--:-- Adam Serwer: I felt fearful for brown Americans the way I did after 9-11 when Muslims and Sikhs who were turbans were attacked indiscriminately.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Did last night feel new to you?
--:-- Adam Serwer: I don't think we have ever seen an American president hold up a member of Congress, a refugee, a person of color, a religious minority as an object of hatred.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We have had racists in the White House. We have had demagogues in the White House. And we have had people like George Wallace who have run explicitly on platforms of white supremacy.
--:-- Adam Serwer: But I don't think we have ever seen an American president use their moral authority particularly in this way.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think this is new. I think it's dangerous.
--:-- Adam Serwer: And I think how Americans respond to it is really going to define what kind of country we're going to be.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like he has so often done in the past today, President Trump kind of half-heartedly tried to distance himself from the ugliness he himself encouraged.
--:-- Adam Serwer: I was not happy with it. I disagree with it. But again, I didn't say that. They did.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think any suggestion that the president disapproved of this chant is disingenuous. The chant is based on his tweet. He was the one who first expressed this sentiment.
--:-- Adam Serwer: It was a horrifying sentiment, but he did something similar with Lock Her Up. At first, people were shocked by it, and then it became a campaign staple.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Whether the line is drawn here or whether Trump will further seek to erode the foundations of multiracial democracy in the United States depends a great deal on how America's elected representatives respond to this.
--:-- Adam Serwer: You published this piece today in The Atlantic titled, What Americans Do Now Will Define forever.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in it, you remind us that Barack Obama used to enjoy reveling in the fact that his particular story, born to a American white woman and an African father with a name like Barack Hussein Obama becoming president, that this story couldn't exist in any other country in the world.
--:-- Adam Serwer: And of course, last night we saw in that same country, a Muslim woman being called to go back to the country she came from by a crowd of Americans.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is our national conversation on race devolving?
--:-- Adam Serwer: I think devolving in some ways underestimates the extent to which this conversation has always been with us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think we are entering a dangerous new phase in part because the president himself, as opposed to, you know, some activist or some political faction, is now himself the champion of this racially exclusivist idea of American citizenship.
--:-- Adam Serwer: But I'm reluctant to say the conversation is devolving because I think this is an important moral dispute, the resolution of which is going to define the country for years to come.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I think it's extremely important that people who believe in pluralism, who believe in the sort of civic nationalism represented by previous presidents and championed by previous presidents, Those people should be defending those principles and not simply giving up in the face of what is an extremely escalating, scary situation.
--:-- Adam Serwer: For those people who are feeling scared right now, I wonder, is there an inevitability that people who want Representative Omar to go back to her country, quote unquote, are fighting a losing battle? This country is getting browner. Brown's going to brown. Are they eventually going to lose out?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I really dislike the demography is destiny type of arguments because American whiteness is very protean.
--:-- Adam Serwer: You know, at one point in American history, it actually excluded conditionally Italians and Jews. And we actually wrote immigration laws to exclude people from those countries from coming here in large numbers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I think that it is a mistake to assume that demographic changes will have a particular political effect. Coalitions shift, parties change.
--:-- Adam Serwer: But I will say this, you know, for people who are concerned about this, you have every right to be concerned. This is a scary moment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The truth is, is that the Republican Party has made a big part of its political project restricting the electorate so that white voters have more influence than they would normally have.
--:-- Adam Serwer: They recognize that they no longer represent a real majority of American citizens. And for what may be the first time in American history, you have an actively anti-racist majority that has twice voted to oppose Donald Trump and what he represents.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: On the one hand, this is a very scary moment. But on the other hand, the American people are probably more progressive on the issue of racism than perhaps they've ever been.
--:-- Adam Serwer: And that's not something that people should laugh at because it's probably never happened before.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I would be remiss to not remind you before we go for the day that the great state of Illinois happens to just also be amazing. It's got the Cloud Gate in Millennium Park. It's got that Paul Bunyan statue in Atlanta, Illinois. It's got the award-winning barbecue in Murfreesboro.
--:-- Adam Serwer: Have you seen Lake Michigan in the summer in Chicago, y'all? Come on. It's amazing what you can find in Illinois. Visit enjoyillinois.com and find your Illinois because who are we kidding? Everyone's up for amazing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And one more amazing thing, Vox is launching a whole new not-quite-daily podcast. It's going to be a thrice-weekly podcast, and it's going to be all about technology and the myriad ways it's changing the way we live and some of the scary stuff, too.
--:-- Adam Serwer: You know, you've got to be careful out there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It doesn't yet have a name as far as I know, but there are a bunch of job postings. If you just Google, you know, Vox Media careers, Vox careers, you can get to the careers page pretty easily.
--:-- Adam Serwer: They're looking for an engineer, producer, even a host, even an executive producer, you name it. They're looking for it right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you think you know someone who might be into it or if you yourself might be into it, throw your name in the hat.
--:-- Adam Serwer: Very explicitly, the website you can find these jobs at is voxmedia.com slash pages slash careers dash jobs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Peace.
