Squad Goals

As I recall, #squadgoals was a popular hashtag around 2015 or thereabouts. The always useful Grammar Girl wrote about the term back then:

"Squad goals" can be simply the goals of your squad (your friends or your clique), but sometimes that seems to play out in practice as simply "awesome," as in "This is awesome," meaning "I or we want this someday," or "We want to be like this." So when you see just a picture of hot women with nothing but the comment "squad goals," it means something like "We want to be like them" or "We want to date them." 

It's good to have goals and it's useful to have a squad. But do you want the Squad? As we've learned in recent days, the four principal members of the Squad are Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley in the Zeppo role. Aside from Pressley, they've all taken star turns in 2019 and bedeviled Nancy Pelosi something fierce. And now Donald Trump has decided to bring them to center stage:

Impeach the MF-o, Al-Qaedo, Zeppo, Clapbacko

Trump went all Merle Haggard on these four, but he seemed to be training particular fire on our local hero, Omar, who walked right into the trap:

Al-Qaeda? Shmal-Qaeda! She won't dignify the question with a response, you see. I'm showing you this clip now because you might as well get used to seeing it; it should be part of just about every Republican ad you'll see in the next cycle.

Democrats want 2020 to be a referendum on Donald Trump. Donald Trump wants 2020 to be a referendum on the Squad and their supporters. Let's go back to Grammar Girl's definition:

"Squad goals" can be simply the goals of your squad (your friends or your clique), but sometimes that seems to play out in practice as simply "awesome," as in "This is awesome," meaning "I or we want this someday," or "We want to be like this."

Maybe the folks in Linden Hills find Ilhan Omar awesome and want to be like the Squad, at least as long as the Cedar-Riverside denizens don't take over all the tables at the Starbucks at 50th and France. But the eternal question remains -- does the Squad play in Peoria? Trump knows the answer. So does Nancy Pelosi, but because Trump will keep these four luminaries front and center, Pelosi has to defend them. And the folks in Peoria are paying attention, to say nothing of the folks in Grand Rapids, and Eau Claire, and Altoona, and even Duluth. Trump knows this, too. And Trump doesn't mind giving offense as long as he stays on offense.