President Donald Trump once again disgraced his office last week, this time by launching into multiple disgusting racist attacks on Somalis in Minnesota, referring to the community as “garbage”.
He particularly singled out Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of his favorite targets. He also froze immigration applications from 19 countries, including Somalia, and deployed immigration enforcement agents to Minneapolis-St. Paul to terrorize the community of 80,000, 83 percent of whom are citizens. Agents have already made multiple arrests, claiming they have seized dangerous criminals; immigration attorney David Wilson in Minneapolis, though, told the Twin Cities-based Sahan Journal that the ICE detainees he’d spoken to had “done nothing wrong but being from the wrong country at a time when the president gets mad.”
|
Trump’s rage is visceral and calculated. He believes that angry performative hate will benefit him politically by rallying his allies, smearing his enemies, and deflecting blame. He also, though, sees ethnic cleansing as an end in itself.
Unvarnished racism
The president’s latest hate tantrum was inspired by the Thanksgiving week shooting of two National Guard members in Washington DC. The alleged gunman was an Afghan refugee who had worked with American troops. At a Mar-a-Lago press event the day after the shooting, Trump blamed former president Joe Biden for allowing the man into the country, though his own administration granted him asylum in April.
Trump didn’t just pass the buck, however. He also spiraled off into an attack on Somalis, who were not connected to the shooting in any way. He sneered that the Somali community in Minnesota was “ripping off our country and ripping apart that once-great state,” and added that Somalia was a country with “no laws, no water, no military, no nothing.” Moments later, however, he admitted that Somalis had nothing to do with the violence in DC.
Not content with these vicious attacks, Trump spewed even more bile at a cabinet meeting last week.
Referring to Somali immigrants, he said, “we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. Her friends are garbage … When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country.”
Trump’s comments were extreme and ugly even by his gutter standards, but the playbook is familiar both from Trump himself and from other fascist regimes. Whenever something goes wrong, whenever his regime is confronted with a problem or a crisis, Trump and his cronies look for some marginalized group to blame.
Trump has blamed the housing shortage on immigrants, insisting that deportations would free up housing stock. (This is nonsense.) His administration has blamed mass shootings on trans people, arguing that they are disproportionately responsible for gun violence. (This is also nonsense.)
And of course, Trumpists constantly blame immigrants for crime. Just last week House Majority Whip Tom Emmer claimed that 80 percent of crime in Minnesota is committed by Somalis.
This is an absolutely outrageous lie, reminiscent of the disgusting Nazi claim in the propaganda film “The Eternal Jew” that Jewish people somehow controlled 98 percent of global prostitution.
These kinds of big lies are not exactly meant to be believed. Instead, they are exaggerated as a way of delighting racist partisans, outraging opponents, and confusing those on the fence who are inclined to think the truth must be somewhere in the middle.
Yes, of course, Jewish people aren’t responsible for 98 percent of prostitution, German vacillators might think, but surely they’re still responsible for a lot! (Jewish people were not responsible for some disproportionate percentage of global prostitution during the 1930s, just as Somalis are not disproportionately responsible for crime in Minnesota. These are both fascist lies.)
|
Trump does not have a policy response to gun violence because he and his coalition love unregulated guns; he also cannot admit that sending National Guard troops into Washington DC escalated tensions and put those troops at risk for no reason. So he looks around for someone else who he can say is responsible for his failures. Trump sees all non-white immigrants as an undifferentiated ominous mass (especially ones from relatively poor countries), so it makes sense to him to conflate Afghans and Somalis and relentlessly attacking the latter.
Rather than addressing the actual problem, he can blame that person over there. That’s how scapegoating works.
|
Attacking Somalis in Minnesota also allows Trump to go after partisan foes. He’s attacked Omar repeatedly and viciously since she was elected in 2018. In 2019, he tweeted footage of her juxtaposed with the World Trade Center collapsing, lying that she supported the September 11 terrorist attacks. Omar subsequently received a slew of death threats. In the same year he also told a group of Democratic congresswomen of color (including Omar) to “go back where you came from.”
Omar, as a Black Muslim woman and a critic of Israel, remains a favorite target of the right-wing marketplace, and Trump obviously sees denigrating her as a reliable way to rally his core constituency of racist ghouls at a time when his poll numbers are plummeting and GOP electoral prospects are bleak. Similarly, attacking Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (who Trump called “seriously retarded”) for his support of Somalis puts Trump on comfortable partisan ground, since Walz was the Democratic VP candidate in 2024.
A sincere commitment to ethnic cleansing
It’s tempting to see this kind of scapegoating as entirely instrumental. Trump, after all, can dial down the racism in certain situations when he feels it’s to his advantage, as in his bizarrely amiable White House meeting with New York’s first Muslim mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.
The truth, though, is that it’s not unusual for bigots to adjust their vitriol based on practical considerations. Hitler himself granted limited exemptions from persecution to Jewish veterans in order to shield his regime from domestic and international criticism. This kind of vacillation doesn’t mean that the bigotry is insincere; it just means that bigots sometimes believe their goals are best served by downplaying their animus. Trump felt that he could gain some advantage from a photo op with Mamdani. In contrast, he sees Omar as defying him, and believes that attacking her is to his advantage. So he indulges in hate.
That hate is not just a way to rally support — it’s the thing that Trump wants to rally support for. Though immigration was seen as one of Trump’s best issues in 2024, the reality of his relentlessly cruel policies has turned most of the public against them. One analysis of recent polls found that only 44 percent of the public approves of Trump’s immigration approach while 53 percent percent disapprove.
The visceral rejection of Trump’s assault on immigrant communities is visible in resistance on the ground in Chicago, in LA, in DC — and now in the Twin Cities, where a recent video captured people in South Minneapolis surrounding and driving off ICE agents as they attempted to detain an East African man. Local officials have also felt empowered to oppose federal policy; Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara has warned his officers that he will fire them if they do not intervene to stop ICE officers from illegally assaulting residents.
Yet despite local and national pushback, Trump plows ahead. In that context, he is not just using Somalis to distract people from the DC shooting; he is also using the DC shooting to justify and ramp up attacks on Somali people.
For fascists like Trump, hatred is both a tactic and a goal. That’s why he defaults to bigotry whenever there is a crisis. Racism is his only tool and his only dream.
