Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi, and Taylor Swift don’t understand #SquadGoals. Here is why I love my squads. | Elizabeth Wellington

I’ve been lucky enough to have two squads of women hold me down in this often lonely and judgy journey called life.

I fell into my first squad when I was 15. I was a total outsider at my elite public school, but my friendship with these three girls who lived on my block in Queens — Pauline, Elgee, and Kathy — was about good times as much as it was about a sense of belonging. These ladies still have my back when it feels like no one else does.

I found my Philly squad when I was in my early 30s. Still new to town, I was in a lonely place because the city of sisterly affection is anything but when you don’t have a ride or die. My Philly posse — Tara, Lita, and Ann Marie — help me navigate murky social waters, including dating. We brunch. We celebrate. We encourage.

This is why I understood why Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) rolled into Congress last November posting Instagram photos of themselves, cleverly captioned with The Squad and #SquadGoals. This bond feels deeper than Sunday brunches. The four young women were entering a politically hostile environment and thought it behooved them to posse up as soon as they hit the Capitol.

It was only a matter of time before the squad sparred with the Republican Party. But they also knew there was a very good chance that their own crew — in this case we’re talking Democrats — would reject some of their collective and individual progressive ideas and their strategy to get them done.

There have been rumors that the women have been ostracized by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Although, the upside of President Trump’s racist Twitter rant that ignorantly demanded that Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Tlaib, and Pressley go back to their own countries — forget that they are all citizens and that only Omar wasn’t born in the United States — may be an uneasy truce between the Squad and Pelosi.

On Tuesday, a CBS News poll showed that voters have very little love for The Squad.

Squads have their roots in sports. In a natural progression, hip hop co-opted the concept. My favorite example is A Tribe Called Quest, Naughty By Nature, and Leaders of the New School, all individual squads that are a part of the Native Tongue’s crew. Pop-culturally speaking, however, a girl squad is a different beast. And it’s certainly deeper than Taylor Swift trotting out her homies during her 2015 concert tour.

“Each of these women found themselves in a space and place that wasn’t necessarily designated for them,” explained Elena Romero, an assistant professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology who has a knack for connecting the dots between hip-hop culture and society. “So they created a safe place for themselves, a soft place to land.”

We can point fingers all day long at the Squad’s policies, politics, and behavior. I winced when Tlaib used a few choice words in January as part of her rallying cry for Trump’s impeachment. And Ocasio-Cortez should probably talk a little less and listen a little more.

But these are growing pains that don’t deserve this hostile treatment, the kind that men who are considered mavericks would never receive. By sticking together no matter what, they’ve created a shield between themselves and their detractors. No woman is out their standing alone. The squad is standing tall together, something women prove time and time again we have trouble doing.

“A lot of time you see women playing both sides of the fence,” Romero said. “These women, however, are deliberate and intentional. They are speaking for women, for black and brown women, so it was strategic for them to form a united front. To take another term from hip hop, they realized that player hatin’ wasn’t going to get them anywhere. So they are capitalizing on loyalty."

This loyalty is at the core of #SquadGoals.

A squad of women numbers more than two and tops out at five. The ideal number is between three and four. I think of Charlie’s Angels as the original TV girl squad and the Golden Girls were certainly a squad in their own right. But the quintessential modern-day home girl squad are Sex and the City’s Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha, followed by Girlfriends’ Joan, Mya, Lynn, and Toni. I’d even say that Girls Trip’s Flossy Posse was a bona fide squad, because a squad can get on your nerves.

Girl squads are not without their share of internal drama because a good squad doesn’t subscribe to groupthink. The beef, however, never seeps out beyond the confines of the group. That said, squads don’t start beef, but trust they will help you end it.

“It was nothing conspiratorial,” Pressley explained last week in an interview with CBS News about how they came to be called the squad. “[It was] very organic. … We were asked to do an interview because we each represent firsts in our own right. So we did this interview and at the end of the interview, they said, ‘Will you all take a picture?’ And we took a picture.”

I took my squads for granted until about two years ago. I was chatting with Tara and she haphazardly mentioned that the squad needed to get together for brunch. I felt like I was being hugged, because in that moment I knew I’d never be alone.