'Count the votes. Respect the results,' said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, who all won resounding reelection victories in their congressional districts, had an important message for Donald Trump on Tuesday night: The election's not over till it's over.
The four House members, collectively known as the "Squad," took to Twitter to call Trump to task for prematurely declaring victory.
In his public remarks in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Trump claimed to have won the states of Georgia and North Carolina despite results remaining unclear in those states.
"This is a fraud on the American public," Trump said, although no media outlet has projected a winner of the presidential election. "Frankly, we did win this election."
Ocasio-Cortez was swift to denounce his claims on Twitter.
"Donald Trump's premature claims of victory are illegitimate, dangerous, and authoritarian," she tweeted. "Count the votes. Respect the results."
Wednesday morning, Trump also earned himself a cautionary notice from Twitter for violating the platform's civic integrity policy in claiming the Democrats were stealing the election.
"Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled," he tweeted. "Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE, and the 'pollsters' got it completely & historically wrong!"
Trump had told reporters on Sunday: "We're going to go in the night of, as soon as that election is over, we're going in with our lawyers," adding, "I think it's terrible when we can't know the results of an election the night of an election in a modern-day age of computers."
Omar also condemned Trump's lack of respect for the democratic process.
"You can't stop ballots from being counted," Omar wrote on Twitter. "This isn't a dictatorship. This man is dangerous."
In a separate tweet, she criticized his relentless undermining of election results: "The irony of worrying about people turning America into Somalia, while allowing Trump to do literally what Somali dictators used to do," Omar tweeted Wednesday. "Wake up, he is destroying everything that sets us apart."
Pressley and Tlaib also appeared to slam Trump's premature declaration of victory on social media.
Pressley retweeted a comment posted by Stacey Abrams Wednesday, which read in part: "Here's where we are. 1. Local elections officials are taking the time necessary to make sure every eligible vote is counted. 2. Trump is losing and trying to crown himself the winner."
And early Wednesday, Tlaib retweeted a meme reading, "Voters decide elections. Not candidates."
All four House members were clear and easy victors in their respective districts Tuesday, despite the GOP maligning them for years.
Trump in particular has leveled racist attacks against the four, who are all women of color.
In 2019, he infamously tweeted that they should "go back" to their own countries to "help fix the broken and crime-infested places from which they came."
Trump has also repeatedly singled out Omar, a Muslim Somali American, for xenophobic outbursts.
He blasted her at a rally in October in Minnesota, repeating xenophobic remarks he'd used a few days earlier on a crowd in Pennsylvania: "How about Omar of Minnesota? We're going to win the state of Minnesota because of her, they say. She’s telling us how to run our country. How did you do where you came from? How’s your country doing? She’s going to tell us — she’s telling us how to run our country."
The crowd chanted, "Lock her up!"
Shortly after the members of the Squad were first elected, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), the first Indian American woman elected to the House of Representatives, explained the animosity of the GOP toward the freshman congresswomen.
"I think they just don't know what to do with powerful women of color," Jayapal told Politico. "I've felt that before in this chamber and I think it's a new level because there's so many more of us now."
And Ocasio-Cortez isn't backing down anytime soon from her criticism of the White House occupant's authoritarian demands.
On Election Day, she also slammed the GOP for its failure to condemn Trump's threat to the election process.
Katy Tur, an MSNBC anchor, had shared a Politico article on Twitter about Trump's efforts to undermine the election, and accompanied it with her own tweet saying, "Republicans publicly silent, privately disgusted by Trump's election threats."
Ocasio-Cortez responded to with two words.
"Publicly complicit," she tweeted.
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
