Donald Trump and his MAGA followers are obsessed with Somali-Americans. The president frequently rants about immigrants from the easternmost African country and their children, using racist rhetoric that would not be out of place at a Ku Klux Klan rally. At a campaign event Monday in Ohio, ostensibly to boost Sen. Jon Husted’s campaign against Democratic challenger Sherrod Brown, Trump fixated at length on Somali-Americans. They “don’t have pants to wear,” he claimed, but then he also expressed anger that they drive “Mercedes Benz and BMWs.” He accused them of being “low IQ” and alleged that they “plundered, ransacked and destroyed” Minnesota, a state with a large Somali immigrant population.
The president’s remarks followed past comments in which he called Somali immigrants “garbage” and said they “aren’t people that work.” Last week, Trump demanded on Truth Social that Minnesotans “fight back,” saying, “Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing.” Just in case his violent implications weren’t clear enough, Trump promised “the Federal Government will come to your rescue” should anyone follow his instructions.
It’s worth remembering Trump’s history of condoning violence. In January 2025, on his first day back in office, the president pardoned people convicted of violent crimes during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. A year later, his administration took pains to shield officers responsible for the shooting deaths of pro-immigrant protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
So it wasn’t too big a surprise when Homeland Security officials raided the home of perhaps the most famous Somali-American in the country, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., on Monday. The action is part of an all-hands-on-deck effort to prove a conspiracy theory that has been percolating on the right for years now, accusing Omar and her family of falsifying her documents to become a U.S. citizen when she was 17. The administration hopes it can denaturalize and deport the progressive lawmaker, whom Trump has deemed “deranged and sick,” repeatedly calling for her to be ejected from the country.
Odds are that the Trump administration has no case at all against Omar — as is true of thousands of other cases it has lost against immigrants so far. Instead, the raid on the Minnesota congresswoman’s home must be understood more as a campaign stunt by a president desperate to distract from his economic failures and the disastrous war in Iran. Omar herself called the raid “pointless” and “the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.” This isn’t even the first time Trump’s goons have gone hunting for evidence that Omar’s citizenship is illegitimate. On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that, during his first term, Trump made the same demand of immigration officials, but they found “insufficient evidence of wrongdoing” and “eventually abandoned” the search.
No matter how many insults or threats Trump flings Omar’s way, he cannot hide that the congresswoman is exactly the opposite of the racist stereotypes he traffics in. She is smart, beautiful and hard-working. Unlike Trump, who grew up a spoiled rich kid in Queens, Omar has overcome steep odds to be where she is. At only eight, she fled war-torn Somalia with her family after gunmen attacked their home and lived in a refugee camp in Kenya for four years. Whatever one’s views of her politics, there can be no denying that everything Omar has attained, from her education to her career, has been earned against high odds.
Trump’s accusations against Omar and Somali-Americans in general have more than a whiff of psychological projection to them.
Trump’s accusations against Omar and Somali-Americans in general have more than a whiff of psychological projection to them. He calls her “crooked” and “terrible,” but in reality it’s Trump who was convicted of defrauding New York State to the tune of half a billion dollars. It’s Trump who tried to steal the 2020 election, and it’s Trump who is using gerrymandering and frivolous lawsuits to try to cheat his way out of Republicans losing the midterms. It’s Trump who has amassed over a billion dollars in shadily sourced wealth as president through cryptocurrency schemes. He even regularly cheats at golf because he’s so incapable of playing fair.
But that all underscores the greater truth about the administration’s attacks on Omar and her fellow Somali-Americans. The success of the congresswoman and her fellow immigrants handily disproves the claim that non-white people are inferior, and instead proves that progressives are right — that the U.S. is better off for allowing people from around the world to live here. For MAGA, the fear of immigration is not about feeling contaminated, but being shown up and exposed as mediocrities in comparison to industrious newcomers.
Trump’s attack on Omar is reminiscent of his previous accusations that Barack Obama was not a real U.S. citizen. In 2011, Trump, who was then a host on NBC’s “The Apprentice,” started a noisy public campaign demanding the then-president produce his Hawaiian birth certificate, implying that Obama, whose father was Kenyan, could not be a legitimate citizen. Obama eventually did release his birth certificate, but that ultimately didn’t matter to Trump and others who promoted and believed the birther lie, because this was never about the legal definition of “citizen.” It was about the way that the erudite, charismatic Obama revealed the insecurities of the people who, only a few years later, would call themselves “MAGA” by disproving their hopes that whiteness confers an excellence that they, on their own merits, could never produce.
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Trump made this especially clear by also trying to prove Obama secretly had bad grades in college. The president’s psychological projection isn’t subtle. Unsurprisingly, he has not been keen on releasing his own grades and test scores, but he is quick to assure us he’s a super-genius because he was able to tell the difference between a man and a woman on a medical exam to diagnose dementia.
Another pointed reminder of MAGA’s true fears came recently when Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, tweeted a photo of non-white students celebrating a University of Texas football win and complained, “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” He later whined about the university accepting foreign students, though he had no evidence these young people in the photo were born outside the country and neglected to offer any rational arguments for why the school should discriminate against worthy students from overseas.
French’s outburst kicked off a debate among right-wing commentators about what they crudely called “the Indian question,” an apparent nod to a Nazi euphemism for antisemitic ideas that eventually led to the Holocaust. This revealed an unbelievably noxious racism, and also served as a tacit admission that concern about immigration is not, despite all the “garbage” talk, about immigrants dragging down the country. The MAGA coalition’s fear is that immigrants will make it a lot harder for mediocre white people to compete for plum jobs and school admissions. While decades of right-wing blather about meritocracy was always a lie, now conservatives are basically admitting it: Racism is a protection racket to shield white D-level students from the consequences of their own laziness.
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This understanding exposes why Trump and MAGA have it in for Somali-Americans. Like any group of people, the Somali immigrant community contains good and bad people in it, but on the whole, their very existence is a testament to human tenacity. Like so many waves of refugees before and after, these are people who took huge risks to survive, and many of them, like Omar, are thriving. Even though the community suffers from extensive poverty due in part to discrimination and the few resources refugees from a war-torn country are able to marshal, it has also produced a large number of entrepreneurs. Somali-Americans have higher than average rates of labor participation and contribute an estimated $8 billion a year to Minnesota’s economy alone. Like many immigrant communities, such as Irish and Italians in the early 20th century, the second generation is doing much better economically than their parents.
In other words, Somali-Americans are living the industrious values that a lot of MAGA types valorize but at which many, especially rich boys like Trump, fall short. This, too, would be fine, if only conservatives could just relax. Part of the American dream is being able to move beyond working that 60-hour week that so many recent immigrants have to put in to survive. There is nothing wrong with being a C student — as long as you don’t take your insecurities out on the A students who just so happen to have darker skin. That’s what makes this racism so baffling. It’s not just that it’s immoral. It’s also a waste of a one precious life to be so angry that someone who looks a little different might be better at some stuff.
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