Trump’s Attack on Somali Americans Is Vile Fascism
He’s testing our country’s tolerance for ethnic persecution. And we’re failing the test.
IS DONALD TRUMP A FASCIST? Americans who brush off that idea sometimes imagine that a real fascist regime, unlike Trump’s, would persecute ethnic minorities. But that’s exactly what Trump is doing. He’s attacking Americans of Somali descent—calling them “garbage,” telling them to “go back to where they came from,” and targeting their communities for revocation of legal immigration status—as his cabinet applauds, his rallygoers cheer, and almost no one in his party objects.
Trump has bashed Somali Americans for years. But recent convictions arising from an investigation of massive welfare fraud in Minnesota, in which crooks siphoned off aid meant for housing, food, and autism treatment, have given the president new ammunition. Seventy-eight people of Somali ancestry have been charged in the scandal. That’s just one-tenth of one percent of Minnesota’s Somali population. But it’s 90 percent of the people charged in the investigation, and that has given Trump a hook to smear the whole community.
On November 19, an article about the fraud scandal began to circulate in right-wing media. Coauthored by provocateur Chris Rufo, the article baselessly alleged that some of the stolen money had been funneled to the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab. Since its publication, Trump has unleashed a torrent of abuse at the Somali community. Here are some of the lowlights.
November 21
Trump announced that based on the fraud investigation, he was “terminating, effective immediately, the Temporary Protected Status (TPS Program) for Somalis in Minnesota.” Not just for criminals, but for all Somalis in the TPS program.
November 23
Trump reposted a message from a Trump fan account that asked: “Would you support the idea of foreign-born citizens be[ing] barred from running for office?” The message featured a picture of Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar—an American citizen, born in Somalia, whom Trump has persistently smeared—alongside Omar Fateh, an American-born Minnesota state senator of Somali descent. The inclusion of Fateh signaled that the proposed curtailment of political rights might extend to Somali descendants born in America.
November 26
After an Afghan national allegedly shot two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C., Trump tried to channel the backlash toward Somali Americans. In a video address, the president falsely asserted that in Minnesota, “hundreds of thousands of Somalians are ripping off our country and ripping apart that once-great state.” His statement was statistically impossible: Fewer than 110,000 people of Somali descent (estimates range from 80,000 to 107,000) live in Minnesota.
November 27
Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump again pivoted from the D.C. shooting to Somalis. “If you look at Somalia, they’re taking over Minnesota,” he charged. “We’re not taking their people anymore. . . . And we’re getting a lot of their people out, because they’re nothing but trouble.”
That night on Truth Social, Trump again claimed that “hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over” Minnesota. He also vowed to “denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility.” Naturalized Americans were left to imagine what “undermine domestic tranquility,” as interpreted by Trump, might mean.
November 29
Trump reposted a tweet that criticized the high “foreign-born share of the US population” and called for “restricted immigration.” The objection in the tweet wasn’t specifically to illegal immigrants. It was to immigrants in general.
November 30
On Air Force One, Trump told reporters that he wanted to stop immigration from “countries like Somalia,” which “don’t register from the standpoint of success. And we frankly don’t need their people coming into our country telling us what to do.” His complaint seemed to be twofold: that immigrants shouldn’t come from poor or troubled countries, and that they should keep their mouths shut.
December 1
On Truth Social, Trump posted a long series of anti-Somali and anti-immigrant messages, including these:
3:18 p.m. He posted a video—apparently recorded at a Somali cultural festival—of dark-skinned people listening to music, singing, and dancing, some of them in burkas or other clothing associated with Islam. The video—which Trump thought was damning, as he made clear in a subsequent post—showed no sign of violence or other disruptive behavior. (The video was stamped by the RAIR Foundation, which describes itself as an opponent of “Islamic supremacists.”)
9:36 p.m. He reposted a tweet from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. “I just met with the President,” she wrote in the tweet. “I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.” She seemed to be reinforcing the president’s anti-immigrant message about the welfare scandal in Minnesota.
10:55 p.m. Trump posted a video of his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, speaking earlier that evening on Fox News. In the clip, Miller boasted that under Trump’s policy, “If you’re illegal, you’re out automatically. But everybody else who was brought here—refugee, asylum status, whatever status—as he said, if you’re not someone who loves this country, if you’re not any benefit to this country, then we’re going to send you out of this country.” Again, immigrants of any status, including naturalized Americans, were left to wonder what “loves this country” and “not any benefit” might mean. In the next hour, Trump recirculated this video twice more.
10:59 p.m. Trump reposted a message suggesting that Omar “needs to be de-naturalized and DEPORTED immediately.” In the next half hour, he posted three more messages calling for her denaturalization and deportation. One of the messages asked whether she was being “protected because she wears a headdress.”
11:07 p.m. Trump posted a TikTok video that recalled an infamous 1993 U.S. military operation in Somalia. “They dragged our two rangers through the streets of Somalia,” said the commenter in the video. “People seem to forget that we were at war with these fucking people. Now they’re sitting here in the United States, and they’re stealing, they’re robbing our money. . . . You got the governor protecting Somali immigrants. You got the mayor of Minneapolis that speaks Somalian, protecting Somali migrant criminals.”
11:21 p.m. Trump reposted another tweet about the Minnesota scandal. “I’M SICK AND TIRED OF THIS FUCKING PIRATES,” said the tweet. “They INVADE, rob us blind, impose their Sharia BULLSHIT, and milk the TAXPAYERS dry with nonstop FRAUD after FRAUD. Meanwhile there’s UNLIMITED cash for these inbred SAVAGES. . . . DEPORT THEM ALL!” The word “savages,” like the potshot at “Sharia,” exposed an animus that transcended the fraud investigation.
11:25 p.m. Trump reposted an Instagram video that called for Omar’s denaturalization. The video declared that “Ilhan Omar and the Somali community in Minnesota represents the single biggest mistake of our immigration policy over the last eighty years.”
11:40 p.m. In case anyone had missed Trump’s November 30 diatribe against Somalis and other immigrants, he reposted a video of it.
11:54 p.m. Trump reposted another video about immigrants from Somalia and similar countries. It warned, “You will have to deal with people praying in the middle of the street while you’re driving.”
December 2
At a televised cabinet meeting, Trump dismissed Somali Americans as worthless, using fabricated statistics:
They contribute nothing. The welfare’s like 88 percent. They contribute nothing. I don’t want ’em in our country, I’ll be honest with you, okay? Somebody would say, ‘Oh, that’s not politically correct.’ I don’t care. I don’t want ’em in our country. Their country’s no good for a reason. Their country stinks. And we don’t want ’em in our country. . . .
We’re gonna go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people that work. . . . They complain and do nothing but bitch. We don’t want ’em in our country. Let ’em go back to where they came from and fix it.
If America were immune to fascism—the kind of fascism that leads to atrocities—this vile, dehumanizing tirade would have drawn dissent from somebody in the room, or at least a collective silence. Instead, Trump’s cabinet erupted in affirmation.
December 3
In the Oval Office, a reporter told Trump that Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, had said he was “proud to have the largest Somali community in the country.” Trump shot back, “Then he’s a fool. I wouldn’t be proud to have the largest Somalian” community. The president went on: “The Somalians should be out of here. They’ve destroyed our country.”
December 4
On Truth Social, Trump went on another anti-immigrant spree. First he reposted a tweet that said American society would collapse unless we “deport every single third world migrant, illegal alien and America hating Visa holder.” Then he reposted a message that described Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian-American congresswoman, as “a walking advertisement for immigration restriction.”
Then Trump reposted a tweet calling for a reprise of the 1924 immigration law that “banned immigrants from certain countries that we viewed as incompatible with our culture.” In case anyone doubted which countries should be excluded, the tweeted warned about immigrants from “vastly different cultures than the mostly Europeans” who had previously come to America.
December 9
At a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump mocked Omar’s “little turban” and said America should “throw her the hell out.” At this, the crowd burst into a chant: “Send her back! Send her back!” The president went on, broadening his attack to Somalis: “They ought to get ’em the hell out of here. They hate our country.” He ad-libbed more fake numbers: “They don’t work. Ninety-one percent unemployment. . . . Ilhan Omar and the people from Somalia, they hate our country.”
Trump left no doubt about his ethnic preferences. He bragged about calling countries like Somalia and Haiti “hellholes,” “shithole countries,” and “filthy, dirty, disgusting” places. And he contrasted these countries with Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, from which he said he’d like more immigrants.
THIS IS THE WAY A FASCIST TALKS: vilifying an ethnic minority, blaming them collectively for crimes, rallying crowds against them, and wielding state power against them.
And this is the way a fascist audience responds: chanting against the president’s targets at a rally and applauding his slurs in the cabinet room.
Maybe the fascists in our government and our country have some moral limit. Maybe beyond that point, they’ll refuse to join in this campaign of persecution. If so, we have yet to find it.
Jeez, I wonder why people from progressive democracies like Norway and Sweden aren't lining up to emigrate to a country run by a regressive, racist, illiberal reality TV star?
I know one Norwegian who'd love to, unfortunately he's locked up for terrorism and mass murder after killing 77 people, including 33 children, and publishing a manifesto that today could probably get mistaken for an official policy document at the White House.
Thank you Will for putting this article together. It’s extremely important to document the hate-filled rhetoric that is spewing forth from this administration. Enough is enough, American’s of all political stripes must speak out against this. This is not who we are.