Hillary Clinton had a point. In September 2016, the Democratic presidential candidate criticized some of her rival’s supporters for backing him. “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” she said at a fundraiser in New York. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

Clinton distinguished these people from some of Trump’s other supporters, whom she described as “people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them ... and they’re just desperate for change.” She told her supporters that this latter basket included “people we have to understand and empathize with as well.” That nuance escaped the Trump campaign, which rallied around the “deplorable” label and said it showed how Clinton was out of touch. Mainstream news organizations tsk-tsked her for breaking a cardinal rule of political campaigning by criticizing the electorate.

Two years into Trump’s presidency, “deplorable” seems almost kind. It’s clear by now that racism is an animating force of Trump’s presidency, yet many of Trump’s supporters and most of the Republican Party still back him after every bigoted slight and discriminatory policy he makes. They may not be willing to admit that they agree outright with everything he says or does, but their continued political support makes the distinction meaningless. Even those Republicans who do voice objections to Trump tend to treat each outburst as a discrete incident, thereby denying the obvious, deeper problem. At this stage, to not object to the president outright is to be complicit in his racist presidency.

The latest evidence comes from where it often does: the president’s personal Twitter account. Speaker Nancy Pelosi sparred last week with “the squad,” a group of four progressive freshman House Democrats, leading its most prominent member, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to claim Pelosi was singling out women of color in the Democratic caucus. Trump, for whatever reason, decided to publicly defend Pelosi by saying she wasn’t a racist. When those lawmakers then criticized Trump, he responded with an extraordinary series of tweets attacking their citizenship.

So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they 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. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!

His hostility is unsurprising. The squad—which also includes congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley—represent everything that Trump is not. These young women are unsparing in their criticism of him and his presidency; Tlaib famously said they would “impeach the motherfucker” shortly after she was sworn into office in January. One can hardly blame them for their zeal, since voters first elected them to Congress in the 2018 midterms as part of the electorate’s broader rebuke of Trump.