A Depraved President Attacks Again

There's always a new low for a man who has been vilifying others for decades.

By Shalise Manza Young

It was depraved 40 years ago when Donald Trump very publicly called for New York to reinstate the death penalty days after five Black and Hispanic boys were wrongly charged with, let alone convicted of, raping a jogger in Central Park.

It was monstrous when Trump pushed the lie that America’s first Black president wasn’t born in the country, called violent white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., “very fine people,” dubbed Haiti and nations on the African continent “shithole countries,” and parroted a known lie pushed by JD Vance that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs.

But this is Donald Trump, and there is always a new low when it comes to his seething racism.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) speaks on the House floor in February 2023 amid an attempt to remove her from a committee. (C-SPAN)

Drowsy Don napped through part of last week’s Cabinet meeting, remarkable given that every person at the table was there to do the only thing that brings Trump any semblance of joy and the only thing they were hired to do: publicly debase themselves and tell Trump, in front of cameras, that no one has ever been manlier, no one has ever been smarter, no one has ever been a better peacemaker, dealmaker, president or friend.

When he awoke, it was to call Ilhan Omar, a sitting congresswoman, “garbage” and rail against the people from the war-torn country of Somalia that she and thousands of others fled, finding a home in Minnesota and other parts of the United States.

Even after decades of hateful, disgusting, perverted, poisoned pablum from Trump, his vicious diatribe against a very specific group was equal parts abhorrent and disgraceful.

“I don’t want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don’t want them in our country. We’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking garbage into our country,” Trump claimed.

When he finished, Vance, whose new goal appears to be becoming his generation’s David Duke, pounded the table to signal his delight with Trump’s rant. Others in the room applauded, a nauseating display of rank bigotry.

(Let’s pause for a second to remember that Trump began demonizing Somalis again after an Afghan national was arrested for shooting two National Guard members in Washington, D.C. If you’re wondering how that tragedy became the Somalis’ problem, keep in mind that Trump apparently believes people seeking asylum are coming from insane asylums.)

For all the Trump regime’s inhumane talk of non-white immigrants broadly and “illegals” more specifically, his targeted attack on the Somali community and Omar feels different, more sinister.

The vast majority of Somalis in Minnesota are American citizens. Of the 84,000 in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, 58% were born here, and 87% of those who were not are naturalized citizens. There are an estimated 260,000 people of Somali descent in the country, and the vast majority are citizens or have protected status.

For some Somali-Americans, this has become a textbook “I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face,” situation: Even though Trump had a history of disparaging Somalis and Omar, Salman Fiqy, who immigrated here in 2009, held a press conference last year publicly endorsing Trump and standing behind him at a rally in St. Cloud. Now he feels betrayed because a man who has always hated his people expressed hatred for his people.

But Somalis have woven themselves beautifully into the fabric of their communities.

Omar’s family fled the country’s civil war and spent four years in a Kenyan refugee camp before being granted asylum and arriving in the United States in 1995; she served in the Minnesota House of Representatives before being elected to Congress in 2018. Other Somalis in the Twin Cities own restaurants and small businesses and are an integral part of the health care, retail, and transportation sectors.

In Maine, Somalis have helped revitalize Lewiston, a former mill town, filling once-empty storefronts and farming the land.

But if Trump has his way, these people, these hardworking, taxpaying, American citizens, will, at minimum, suffer. They are ethnically Black, and most of them are Muslim, meaning A) Trump is predisposed to loathing them, and B) they are not a group that will garner a groundswell of sympathy around the country thanks to centuries of anti-Black hatred and decades of Islamophobia.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons and assorted other masked thugs have been sicced on Minneapolis to terrorize the Somali community, though the governor and mayors of both Minneapolis and St. Paul have been steadfast in their support of the group.

But there may be reason to fear that the suffering won’t just be in the form of armed, untrained lunatics busting out their car windows and chasing them in the streets.

In recent months, Puppy Killer Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security has openly used the word “remigration,” an idea of white supremacists who believe in the “replacement theory” that non-white people in the United States and Europe are trying to eradicate people of European descent. In practice, remigration would be an ethnic cleansing, involving massive deportation of non-whites in the United States, the most extreme approach to remaking a country that has never, for one day, been entirely white (a completely made-up construct) in their vision.

You’ll be unsurprised to learn the idea of remigration was considered by Adolf Hitler— at one point he weighed rounding Jewish people up and sending them to Madagascar—before he ultimately opted for concentration camps and mass death.

For a decade, we’ve watched Trump, bolstered by his ardent fans and media outlets either happy to help push his propaganda or scared to tell the truth for fear of being labeled “liberal,” envenom the discourse with ever-more-harmful invective. He has gotten more and more extreme, more open in using a bullhorn, not a dog-whistle.

Trump woke up in time to close out his Cabinet meeting with an appalling, racist rant. Now, we have to be awake to what is happening, and what he wants to achieve.

Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.

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