The president tried to advance a racist narrative about Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar Thursday evening, but instead revealed how much he doesn’t know the bare basics of marriage.
“It was just revealed that Ilhan Omar’s name is not Ilhan Omar, the one she used to get elected and sworn into Congress, but rather, it’s an entirely different name, Ilhan Nur Said Elmi,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday night, drudging up a practically ancient GOP attack against the Somali-born lawmaker that baselessly accused her of marrying her brother.
To iron out the record: Omar’s birth name is Ilhan Abdullahi Omar (a spokesperson for the representative confirmed this to Fox News). Trump’s grand evidence that Omar’s ex-husband was actually her brother appears to be that they shared a last name—a cultural expectation of women when they tie the knot. Her decision to keep using “Omar” after their marriage would also strike married women as resoundingly regular, as many career women keep using their maiden names in the workplace to minimize confusion.
“When asked whether or not she married her brother, she said, ‘Not to my knowledge.’ In other words, she somehow didn’t know?” Trump continued. “Therefore, because she used a fake name to be sworn in, I assume she must IMMEDIATELY resign from Congress.”
The president insisted that Omar should “not be legally allowed to be a member of this August Body from this point forth” because of the Republican-created controversy.
MAGA conservatives have rumbled for years—without evidence—that Omar married her brother as a form of immigration fraud to enter the U.S. The conspiracy first emerged during her 2016 campaign for the Minnesota state legislature in a since-deleted post on the conservative blog Power Line, where an anonymous source was quoted as saying that Omar’s ex-husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was related to her by blood.
Omar has vehemently and repeatedly denied the unfounded allegations, which have been disproven by her marriage certificate. Responding to the conspiracy in 2016, Omar described the insinuation that she had married her brother to be “absurd and offensive.”
But Republicans have really turned up the temperature against Omar in recent days. Just last week, Homeland Security agents raided her home in a fruitless attempt to uncover evidence that her age did not match her original citizenship paperwork. Omar told reporters that agents “went room by room” and “took 17 items.”
In a statement at the time, Omar called it “an outrageous abuse of power and an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.” In an interview with MS NOW, the longtime Trump critic said the raid was “designed” to freak her out.
Nonetheless, Omar decided Thursday that the raid had made her living situation in Washington unfeasible.
“Obviously, I can’t continue to live there,” she told MS NOW. “So we have to figure out where to move to because our address has been public, and with the death threats that I deal with, it’s no longer going to be feasible to be in that house and have my kids visiting off and on, having people track them.”