When Donald Trump attacks Somali immigrants, he attacks America
The president's recent rant against Somalis spotlights a white nationalist vision to remake the U.S., and needs to be called out for the unforgivable hate speech that it is.
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
At the start of this month, we were reminded anew of Donald Trump’s ability to engage in the most calamitous attacks against American society without provoking anything close to sufficient pushback, whether from the Democratic opposition, pundits, or the public at large. At the end of a cabinet meeting, through which he appeared to drift and doze, Donald Trump came alive for a brief time as he unleashed a horrendous rant about the Somali immigrant community. He averred that Somalia “stinks and we don’t want them in our country,” that Somalia is “no good for a reason, that “They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” and that “We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.” (Later in the week, as if to remove all doubt that his comments were not the result of a sleep-deprived fugue state, he continued with his slander, declaring that '“Somalis were ‘taking over’ Minnesota and that Somali gangs were ‘roving the streets looking for prey.’”)
At the cabinet meeting, Trump also directly targeted Somali-American Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, saying “Ilhan Omar is garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’” As the president spoke and his cabinet secretaries looked on in silence, Vice President JD Vance banged the table in agreement, like a small town Mississippi sheriff huzzah-ing the declarations of a KKK Grand Wizard at a midnight rally (and in the process cementing his identity as one of the most craven and degenerate politicians of his generation).
In an earlier era, Trump’s words would have provoked near-universal calls for a public apology. But describing his words simply as racist, as many have done, is insufficient. Trump’s declarations don’t just represent the personal prejudices of an elderly man in cognitive decline. With the power and reach of the bully pulpit, Donald Trump declared an entire nationality inherently “garbage”: not fully human, irredeemable at a basic cultural and biological level, parasitic and predatory in a way that renders them an unassimilable threat to America. Spoken by the president of the United States, one who directs a vast bureaucratic apparatus that has steadily worked to erode the rights of non-white citizens and immigrants alike over the past year, his words were a sulfurous sales pitch for a white supremacist America and a promise to unleash the power of the state against these supposed enemies. And in fact, as Noah Berlatsky describes in an excellent piece, the Trump administration subsequently “deployed immigration enforcement agents to Minneapolis-St. Paul to terrorize the community of 80,000 [Somalis], 83 percent of whom are citizens.”
What the president said in the Oval Office last week was unforgivable, and requires a widespread public and political response. Such a response should recognize that Trump’s hate speech against Somalis was a signal instance of the administration’s transformation of white nationalist tenets into national policy. As Zack Beauchamp describes in a grim but illuminating analysis, the second Trump administration has fully woven radical far-right, anti-immigrant ideas into government policy; examples include the centrality of mass deportations and claims that certain nationalities and ethnicities are not capable of integrating into American society and culture. As Stephen Miller, a leading administration proponent of anti-immigrant hatred, recently wrote, “No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” Such slanderous repudiation of immigrants finds its greatest expression in the Great Replacement Theory — now broadly adopted by politicos across the GOP — which paranoiacally holds that immigrants are actively replacing white Americans in a sinister international plot.
This right-wing vision of a white-dominated United States is a moral abomination and a direct threat to our democracy, and must be confronted as the mortal threat that it is — including when the president of the United States articulates key aspects of it, as he did last week. Rooted in centuries-old conflicts over whether the U.S. should be a multi-ethnic democracy or remain the fiefdom of whites, the Trump administration embodies a counter-revolution against an imperfect but steady expansion of citizenship to fully include non-white Americans, particularly over the last 60 or so years. Trump and his allies have seized on curtailing immigration and denigrating immigrants as a central pillar of implementing this white nationalist vision. In practical terms, it means stopping any additional non-whites from further diluting the body politic, either by bans or by making life unbearable even for documented immigrants who live here. And administration schemes to denaturalize citizens point to a broader, still more ominous objective — of actively cleansing the country of those who have legally made this country their home.
But the anti-immigrant animus in the American white nationalist vision isn’t just meant to rid the U.S. of non-white newcomers and recent arrivals. The obsessive emphasis on the purported cultural and racial inferiority of darker-skinned peoples is inseparable from a parallel — and I would argue, even more significant — effort to disparage and disempower non-white Americans whose ancestors have been here for generations, even centuries. By cultivating an us-versus-them mindset, in which dark-skinned interlopers are taking advantage of white Americans, or even actively doing them harm, the offensive against migrants foments hatred, fear, and violence among white Americans toward all their non-white neighbors. Posing as an effort to save the U.S., it is in fact an effort to break this country. It is nothing less than a de facto war on America’s actual multi-cultural society, on our democracy with its key principle of equality, and on our collective power as a country that draws on the participation and talents of all. If successful, this effort would remake the U.S. into a deeply hierarchical, apartheid state, with democracy placed in deep freeze, civil rights eviscerated, and casual violence against non-whites enabled by a justice system that denies them their full rights.
Trump’s vicious attack on Somalis is a watershed because it rips away all plausible deniability as to what this administration is doing, and is a perfect demonstration of the implacable hatred and moral vacuum at its heart. The president lumped together all Somalis not only as unassimilable, but as active, inhuman enemies of the United States. Significantly, in doing so, he also attacked those who are citizens by explicitly targeting Representative Omar.
But Trump and MAGA’s animus toward Omar helps us grasp the rank racism and madness at the center of white nationalism, as her very existence repudiates its central beliefs. As a representative elected to Congress, Omar’s political trajectory sticks a shiv in the insane idea that Somalis are somehow a subhuman, alien race who cannot integrate into American society. Her unwavering opposition to our authoritarian president, despite his personal threats that inevitably feed a cascade of death threats against her, shows that she understands the basic values of American democracy and society infinitely better than the president and his allies. When Trump calls her “garbage,” it is not because he has keenly assessed her worth and found it lacking, but because slander is all he has left against the proof she provides that white nationalism is a malicious ideology based on lies and hate.
The same goes for the overwhelming majority of Somalis in the United States, who are routinely praised and defended by those who actually know them. And now it is upon the rest of us to defend those of Somali ancestry against a president who would incite Americans to dehumanize and ostracize them.
Rather than despair or shrug at how President Trump has overwhelmed our collective capacity to respond to the most dangerous provocations, the future of our democracy and free society require that we continue to maintain distinctions between the merely terrible, the truly grotesque, and the absolutely unforgivable. Doing so allows us to prioritize and strategize the necessary long-term responses, no matter how futile they might feel in the moment, with the understanding that we can and must encourage mass public repudiation of this president and the right-wing forces and ideologies that empower him. When the president uses the language of fascism to target an entire people who live within our borders, working to hold him to account isn’t being “distracted” by secondary issues, or falling into his political trap: it’s defending the United States against unforgivable attacks against its own people and those immigrants here to make better lives for themselves.