Last week, federal agents searched the home of Minnesota’s Representative Ilhan Omar, as part of an investigation into her immigration to the United States decades ago. Given that Omar has been a particular target of Donald Trump’s hatred for the last decade, it is reasonable to assume that this extraordinary abuse of power is a Hail Mary effort to scramble a dominant midterms narrative that is currently focused on the president’s manifold failures in office and the GOP’s impending electoral doom. After all, it’s simply unbelievable that after years of unsuccessfully trying to dig up dirt on Omar, the administration just happened to do so right before the GOP faces an almost-certain reckoning in November. It’s also close enough to the election to violate long-time Justice Department guidelines about publicly announcing the investigation of an elected official — this is a move meant to make a splash.
But the the obvious efforts to create a distraction, or even change the thrust of election reporting in the coming weeks, shouldn’t obscure the dire seriousness of what the administration is in fact doing. At the level of the rule of law, Trump is abusing the power of the federal government to go after someone he considers to be a political enemy; and not only this, he’s going after a member of the legislative branch in a way that obviously sets a precedent for a complete collapse of the separation of powers and the ability of the Congress to reign in a lawless president. To seek to criminalize one’s political opponents on fake or trumped-up charges is the mark of an authoritarian regime, not a democratic republic. And the harm includes not just an offense to the politician so targeted, but to the constituents who voted to have this person represent them.
But the administration’s clear intention of finding a basis on which to strip Omar of her citizenship, and to deport her from the U.S., constitutes a second, equally profound layer to the case, where authoritarian intent melds with white supremacist ideology. As John Ganz writes in an essential analysis of the Trump administration’s maneuvers, “the attack on citizenship itself is both the very essence of the Trump movement and its most dangerous feature. From birtherism to the stolen-election myth, Trumpism can be understood as the notion that some Americans are not really Americans, that their political rights are illegitimate, and that the nation must be purged of these interlopers.” After years of incitement of hatred against immigrants, the massive escalation of violent enforcement actions against the undocumented and documented alike during Trump’s second term shows that MAGA is, at its heart, a movement that sees American identity in racialized terms. Real Americans are white; anyone else is at best a second-class citizen, and at worst a literal invader who must be expelled beyond the nation’s borders.
So targeting Ilhan Omar is an opportunity to punish a political enemy and harm the Democratic Party, while also broadcasting to non-white immigrants that they are not wanted here and that the same treatment could be in store for them. But it’s not just that this hangs the threat of de-naturalization and/or expulsion over every naturalized citizen or recent arrival. NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg observes that it’s also “sending a message to every foreign-born American. Oppose Trump too loudly, and the government will comb through your paperwork — including paperwork filled out by your parents — for errors that could upend your life.” In other words, making an example out of Omar is a form of social and political control, a way of intimidating millions into political complacency even if the Trump administration never singles them out for special attention, or fully succeeds in its mass deportation goals.
The seriousness of what I’ve described — the attempt by a president and his movement to strip a congresswoman of her citizenship, while intimidating millions of American citizens and immigrants into lives of fear and alienation in the country they call home — is clearly sufficient to require a strong and sustained Democratic response. At the constitutional level, congressional Democrats cannot abide a strategy that, if successful, would weaken the party by opening the door to the Trump administration literally expelling from the country any representative who happens to be a naturalized citizen. Not only would this be a material threat to the strength of the party, but such an unanswered attack would rightly stir a sense of betrayal and outrage at party weakness by millions of loyal voters.
It should be obvious to even the most cautious of Democratic officials that a message of “an attack on one of us is an attack on all” is the baseline requirement in this situation. To take at face value the charges being considered against Omar is to grant to the Trump administration a deeply unwarranted presumption of good faith; there is every reason to believe that, beyond the clearly selective and thus illicit nature of this prosecution, the Justice Department’s investigation is already marred by some of the same irregularities and outright illegalities that have derailed other politically-motivated cases concocted by the president and his allies. The president’s long-time contempt for Omar — already in his first term, he was urging her to go back to Somalia — should make clear that this prosecution is at best the vendetta of a failing president.
But even more than this, the Democratic Party needs to engage in a pushback that recognizes its elected officials’ obligation to defend not just Omar and their own political standing, but the millions of naturalized citizens and immigrants who are indirectly targeted by this abuse of power. And this obligation, in turn, points us to something that has been absent from even the best of the analyses so far: that the Trump administration’s own attempt to actively highlight MAGA’s vast racial hatred should be viewed as a huge opportunity for the Democratic Party. Most Americans find such state-sponsored white supremacism unacceptable, and this basic reality means that the Trump administration’s aggressive actions, as dangerous as they are, also create massive self-inflicted vulnerabilities for MAGA. And the main way for those vulnerabilities to carry a political price — ideally a catastrophically high one! — is for MAGA’s opponents to call public attention to them, and to describe them in righteous yet accurate terms as the un-American beliefs of a racist, radical minority at war with our democracy and the shared bonds of citizenship.
The counter-arguments to the GOP’s war on immigrants and naturalized citizens are not difficult to grasp or to articulate. Hatred of people for the color of their skins or their countries of origin is racist and arguably evil. The United States has always been, and always will be, a diverse country, built by people from hundreds of lands and ethnicities. Over the last half century, we have grown more diverse as we have done away with racist restrictions on who can immigrate to this country and become a citizen. But as basic as these arguments are, and as foundational as I believe they are to most Americans’ understanding of our country, they will not magically voice themselves. Too often, though, too many Democrats have shied away from explicitly embracing American’s real and irradicable diversity — and from confronting the white supremacist thinking that has come to dominate the Republican mainstream.
This debate cannot be ducked, as the triumph of MAGA’s white supremacist vision of America would reduce our country to a shadow of its former self, with tens of millions demoted to second-class citizens and power illicitly channeled to some Americans on the mere basis of skin color. If Omar’s case is not the place to make a stand, then where will they ever draw the line?
Indeed, the larger backdrop for the GOP targeting of Ilhan Omar vividly highlights this general Democratic reluctance to engage in a political debate over the nature of American identity that MAGA has placed front and center in American politics. For Donald Trump and MAGA have not only targeted Omar for years, but have directed towards the larger Somali population in the U.S. inflammatory, openly racist condemnations that verge up to the line of incitement of violence — making the targeting of Somalis as clear an example as possible of MAGA’s goal of an ethnically purified America.
As the flimsiest of excuses for their attacks, they have pointed to a widespread welfare abuse scandal in Minnesota involving members of the Somali community. Yet their screeds have not only targeted immigrant Somalis, but Somali-American citizens, making crystal clear that MAGA is targeting an entire ethnic group as being incompatible with integration into the U.S. due to its allegedly innate qualities. Trump has stated outright of Somalis that “I don’t want them in our country,” and has denounced them as “low IQ” — a shockingly despicable presidential renunciation of a specific group of citizens. Such rhetoric has only continued to escalate through the present, with Trump recently posting on social media that the “once Great State of Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants” and “Fight back Minnesota, fight back! If you need, the Federal Government will come to your rescue.”
Yet all of these eruptions of hate are based entirely in racist fantasy. Salon’s Amanda Marcotte describes how the MAGA assertion that Somalis are moochers off the welfare state is a slanderous fabrication:
[The Somali community in the U.S.] 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.
Moreover, as commentators like Goldberg and The Nation’s Elie Mystal have pointed out, Omar herself is a potent, distilled repudiation of the white supremacist project. Mystal asserts that, “It is precisely because her success defeats the white-supremacist narrative pushed by the Trump administration and the white-wing media that she is being threatened and hunted by this administration.” For MAGA, the problem is not so much that Somalis or Omar are actually terrible, but that their very existence and success negates MAGA’s very basis for existence; Somalis who have already helped make America great nullify the purported MAGA mission to make American great again.
So it is worth imagining how Trump’s attempts to cast Omar out of the country would sound to the voting public if, in the face of such open racism and targeting of a specific ethnic group within our borders, Democrats had previously chosen to present a coordinated front that worked to turn MAGA’s racist aggression against Somalis back against MAGA; if they had chosen to spend political capital on asserting that a president who attempts to demonize a group of Americans and immigrants for their nationality and skin color betrays his oath of office while permanently branding himself as an execrable white supremacist. It is worth imagining how much weaker Trump would be, and how much likelier that his attempts to exile Omar would be immediately viewed by more of the public as further evidence of his depravity.
But it is not too late. Democrats shouldn’t be fooled by a false choice between “falling for” Trump’s bait, on the one hand, and doing the right thing by standing up en masse for a threatened colleague, for the principles of constitutional government, and for basic American principles of equality that MAGA seeks to abolish. Indeed, even the preternaturally cautious Barack Obama has weighed in on the slanderous legal jihad against Omar, calling it “appalling” and laying out a case for why selective prosecution of a political opponent is fundamentally un-American. Democrats should take up Obama’s line of argument, and push it further by highlighting how the attack on Omar is a facet of a far larger project to demonize all immigrants, Somali or otherwise.
Believing that the president forever possesses impregnable strength on issues of immigration and race is not so much cynical politics on the part of Democrats as a tragically self-fulfilling prophecy; the sooner congressional Democrats aggressively and collectively confront the sheer racism and latent violence of the MAGA vision, the closer they will be to demolishing this radical movement’s malign influence on our politics.