On October 15, 1969, Somali President Abdurashid Ali Shermarke was slain by an assassin’s bullet. Unrest had prevailed in the country ever since … well, in many ways, ever since independence was won in 1960, but particularly over the previous couple years. Then as now, Somalia didn’t register much in most Americans’ minds, but the editors of The New York Times judged the event newsworthy enough that it made the front page, with a report noting the imposition of a curfew in “Mogadiscio,” as the capital was then styled by the paper of record.
Six days later, a military junta took control of the country under the leadership of Mohammed Siad Barre. He was a socialist, and he imposed Marxist-Leninist government, aligning with the Soviet Union. But over time, his relationship with Moscow soured. The Soviets frowned upon Somalia’s 1977 invasion of Ethiopia and switched allegiances. According to a 1982 New York Times op-ed by the respected comparative political scientist David D. Laitin, Washington began to take an interest in Siad Barre. Jimmy Carter did so tentatively; but “President Reagan, abandoning caution, gave Mr. Siad Barre a warm welcome in Washington” that March, Laitin wrote. Little countries like Somalia at the time were just pieces on a Cold War chessboard on which the Reagan administration moved around its pawns with particular aggression.
By the late 1980s, discontent with Siad Barre was such that rebel groups began engaging government forces; a civil war erupted. By the early 1990s, Somalia was a failed state. Siad Barre went into exile. Governments couldn’t patch the nation together. And around that time, Somalis began to flee to Kenya—hundreds of thousands of them, into refugee camps. The largest, Dadaab, is still home to some 400,000 Somali refugees, 35 years later.
Why should all this matter to you right now? Because one of those refugees, Nur Omar Mohammed, took his children to Dadaab. By 1995, they were granted asylum by the United States of America and came here, eventually applying for citizenship. One of those children was 17 or 18 at the time of the citizenship application. That wouldn’t seem to matter much in the broad scheme of things, whether a youngster was this age or that some 30 years ago. But today, that youngster is Minnesota Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar, and Donald Trump and his subordinates are moving heaven and earth to use that alleged discrepancy to get her expelled not only from Congress but from the United States that once welcomed her.
The Trump administration’s move against Omar is repulsive. And it’s sure not happening because her father might have recorded her age inaccurately half a lifetime ago (an allegation that, as yet, remains unproven publicly). It’s happening first and foremost because she’s a very vocal critic of Trump and MAGA-ism. True, alongside her criticisms of Trump, she’s also made some remarks that smacked of antisemitism, and which were deserving of denunciation. But in this country, it’s the voters who decide whether such comments disqualify someone from office. And Omar’s voters have returned her to Congress three times after her initial election in 2018, and they’re about to do so again. And since she hasn’t been stopped at the ballot box, Trump is now searching for other means to do so.
And by the way, those voters include citizens in the heavily Jewish enclave of St. Louis Park, the famous home of the Coen Brothers and Al Franken. If homegrown opposition to Omar was to arise, it would have been from there. She did win the 2022 Democratic primary narrowly, but in 2024, she won the primary handily, and in the general, she carried nearly 70 percent of the vote in St. Louis Park.
But let’s be real. This is also happening because Omar is Somali—because she’s a Black Muslim woman who wears a hijab. These things aren’t quantifiable, and of course Trump and his spokespeople, at least the ones who haven’t lied about their legal careers, would never admit to these aspects of this piece of political persecution. But we all know it’s there.
Actually, now that I think about it, Trump has admitted to his hatred of Somalis and has done so rather openly. Ever since details spilled out about large-scale welfare fraud in the Minneapolis Somali community, Trump has been talking and posting about it incessantly and trying to connect it to Omar. It’s undeniably true that the scale of the fraud is nightmarish. But there’s no evidence of any such connection. (The Biden Justice Department opened an unrelated investigation into Omar’s finances, but it “stalled for lack of evidence.”)
That hasn’t stopped Trump from calling Omar “garbage,” as he did in a Cabinet meeting last year, and from ranting about Somalis generally in a way that can plainly be called racist and can arguably be called fascist. Am I being melodramatic here? Consider these Trump sentences, from an October 8 Truth Social post: “The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back! If you need, the Federal Government will come to your rescue.”
The racism is apparent in the first two sentences, which seek to incite hatred based specifically on the nationality of population in question. But those third and fourth sentences … how exactly is he proposing that Minnesotans “fight back”? And when he says the federal government will “come to your rescue,” what precisely does he mean? And who is the “you” he is addressing?
I think we have a pretty good idea—he means that if certain “real” Minnesotans were to take the matter of the “Somalians” into their own hands, he’d order in armed troops to back them up. Whether this is fascist is in the eye of the beholder. But I’ll just note this: On April 1, 1933, the Nazis organized a boycott of Jewish shops and department stores. Brownshirts who stood outside the stores held signs: “Germans, defend yourselves against the Jewish atrocity propaganda, buy only at German shops!”
We’re not there just yet. But what if a few Minnesotans—good, pure, white, ancestral Minnesotans—barreled into Cedar-Riverside, Minneapolis’s “Little Mogadishu,” incensed in part by the incendiary rhetoric of the president of the United States, and had themselves a little shoot-up, or broke a few shop windows? Trump has already committed the federal government—a phrase that implicates all of us, by the way—to coming to their “rescue.”
And what of his pursuit of Omar? Trump has been firing blanks in courtrooms his entire second term in his jihad against his political enemies, so there’s reason to think that this one will crumble the way all the others have.
In the meantime, it’s the duty of every antifascist American, however one might feel about some of Omar’s past comments, to stand arm-in-arm with her here. She is in this country as a result of a tragic chain of events that the United States, playing Cold War roulette, helped set in train. But this country did make amends by welcoming her to its shores. And once here, far from asking for handouts—the right’s standard caricature of people like her—she got herself educated and elected to the Minnesota state house and, finally, to the U.S. House of Representatives.
If Omar were a Republican with a last name like Schultz, Trump sure wouldn’t be ordering people to raid her house and asking what year she was born—he would be effusing over her American success story. But to Trump, who has nothing but contempt for this country’s founding principles and its immigrant fabric, she is the wrong kind of American. He’s right that there are wrong kinds of Americans. He’s just wrong about who they are.