Damn, this thread is enjoyable.

2/ "The president won this one," said House Dem 1 of the Trump v Squad (AOC, Tlaib, Omar & Pressley) showdown. "What the president has done is politically brilliant. Pelosi was trying to marginalize these folks and the president has now identified the entire party with them."

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) July 17, 2019

4/ "…instead of the issues the president brings up deliberately. Anything that takes away from bread and butter issues is playing into his hands."

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) July 17, 2019

6/ This perceived selective outrage rankled some Dems.

"Everybody was completely outraged by what the president said," said House Dem 3, "and everybody thought it was appropriate to criticize him…

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) July 17, 2019

8/ A few House Dems noted that Omar and Tlaib just introduced a resolution affirming the right of Americans to boycott, perceived as an expression of support for the anti-Israel BDS (boycott, divest, and sanction) movement that most House Dems oppose.

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) July 17, 2019

10/ House Dem 4 recalls that "less than 2 weeks ago when members of our caucus were trying to support funds for children at the border," the Squad was arguing that "we're pro-putting kids in cages, we're against human rights. So there’s frustration."

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) July 17, 2019

12/ AOC, in particular "gives her chief of staff license to get candidates to run against her colleagues and to go after them on social media. It makes people's skin crawl," said House Dem 3.

House Dem 4 summed it up: "We were there for them; they should stop attacking us."

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) July 17, 2019

If it’s true that picking a fight with the Squad — at least on “go back to where you came from” grounds — is a political loser for Trump, some members of the Democratic caucus are slow to see it. The grievances here about Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff allegedly organizing primary challenges to some Dem incumbents are real and longstanding too. That was a key complaint in the Dem pile-on of Saikat Chakrabarti this past weekend, which feels like ancient history now because it happened 48 hours before Trump started tweet-ranting “love it or leave it” stuff at Ilhan Omar. But it’s fuel on the fire that’s burning through comity on Pelosi’s side of the aisle.

Trump thinks he’s winning this fight and wasn’t shy about saying so to reporters this afternoon. Note the shot here about Omar possibly having married her brother:

There’s no question that something strange is going on in her marital history. Whether one of the men she was married to is actually her brother remains uncertain, as far as I know, but Trump’s not pulling that out of nowhere.

As for his point about the Dems going left on Israel, it makes me laugh that immediately after smoothing over the big Democratic brawl over AOC’s chief of staff by coming together to rebuke POTUS, Dems are about to have a new fight over the BDS movement thanks to Omar and the Squad. Here she is today making the case that BDS is sort of like the Boston Tea Party in that they’re both nonviolent means of pressuring an occupying power to leave. Which I guess makes the colonial continental army sort of like … Hamas? I don’t know. Cheers to House Democrats as they try to figure that one out.