Trump’s jab at Ilhan Omar isn’t just a feud. It’s a mirror of America’s anxieties.
When former President Donald Trump told reporters he had asked Somalia’s president to “take back” Rep. Ilhan Omar, the line landed like a punchline in the room—and a gut punch across the Somali diaspora. Omar, the Somali-born Democrat from Minnesota and one of the most visible Muslim women in American politics, answered in kind, calling Trump “a lying buffoon” and urging the public not to dignify his claims. The exchange may sound familiar. It is the latest verse in a long-running political ballad about belonging, borders, and the power of rhetoric in American life.
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A familiar script, louder stage
Trump’s remarks—delivered with the casual humor of a man who knows a viral clip when he creates one—echo a pattern that dates back to his “go back” jab at four congresswomen of color in 2019 and, earlier still, to his campaign launch in 2015 and the so-called “Muslim ban” that followed. Omar, elected in 2018 after arriving in the United States as a refugee in the 1990s, has been a frequent foil. She is part of “the Squad,” a small group of progressive lawmakers whose ideas on immigration, foreign policy, and policing often clash with Trump’s base and with establishment politics generally.
In his latest salvo, Trump claimed—without evidence—that he suggested to Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud that Omar be deported. He also revived a debunked rumor about Omar’s family, and he cast Somalia as a place of unrelenting “poverty, terrorism, piracy, corruption, and pervasive violence,” a one-note portrait that many Somalis recognize as a caricature of a complex country struggling toward stability.
The facts behind the theater
A few points are worth stating plainly. There is no public record that Trump met with Somalia’s president around the United Nations General Assembly, as he implied. Somalia, for its part, does indeed have a president—Hassan Sheikh Mohamud returned to office in 2022—and a federal government that, with help from African Union troops and international partners, is fighting an entrenched insurgency while trying to rebuild institutions. The country’s communities function in the shadow of fragility, yes, but also with resilience. Remittances from Somalis abroad exceed a billion dollars each year, keeping families afloat and businesses alive. That’s not nothing.
On the U.S. side, there is no mechanism for a president to “deport” a U.S. citizen for their views. Naturalized American citizens enjoy the same constitutional protections as those born here; revocation of citizenship is extremely rare and tied to provable fraud, not political dissent. And while Trump suggested Omar should be “impeached,” members of Congress are not impeached; they can be censured or expelled by a two-thirds vote of the House. The imprecision is not incidental. It blurs civic understanding at a moment when the guardrails rely on an electorate that knows how the system works.
Why Somalia gets dragged into American culture wars
Somalia occupies a unique place in the American political imagination. For some, it stands as a shorthand for failed governance and endless conflict—the Black Hawk Down stereotype that never quite faded. For others, especially in places like Minneapolis, Columbus, and Seattle, Somalia is also family dinners, mosque on Fridays, small shops where the air smells like cardamom tea and incense, soccer pitches crowded with kids, and parents who worked overnight shifts to put their children through school.
To invoke Somalia in a domestic political fight isn’t just a jab at a distant country; it’s a way of interrogating who gets to critique America, who speaks for it, and who belongs inside its circle of “us.” The question is as old as the Republic. The targets shift—Irish, Italian, Jewish, Japanese, Mexican, Muslim—but the script repeats. In recent years, European politicians have played similar cards with Syrian and Afghan refugees; in Latin America, Venezuelan migration has become a touchstone. Across democracies, immigration has again become a wedge that sorts anxieties about security, identity, and economic change.
What this says about power, and about truth
There is also the matter of how jokes work in politics. Delivered with a grin, Trump’s comments drew laughter in the room. Humor is a useful tool—it disarms, travels faster than policy, and sticks longer than footnotes. But jokes can seed misinformation. Say something outlandish, then call it banter, and the fact-checkers sound like scolds at a picnic. Meanwhile the insinuation lingers: that a duly elected congresswoman, a citizen, could be sent “back,” and that a foreign leader might nod along.
In a media ecosystem optimized for speed, the half-life of untruths grows shorter but their spread grows wider. Omar’s furious response—calling him an “embarrassing fool”—captured attention, but it also kept the spotlight where Trump wanted it. This is the paradox faced by politicians of color who become lightning rods: answer, and you amplify; ignore, and the smear goes unanswered.
The stakes in Minnesota—and beyond
In Minnesota, where one of the largest Somali communities outside Africa has put down roots, Trump’s latest volley is not just rhetoric but atmosphere. Community leaders have spent years fighting disinformation online, particularly conspiracy theories about refugees and Muslim Americans. At the same time, the past decade has seen Somali-American entrepreneurs build trucking companies and restaurants, young professionals enter city government and state agencies, and, yes, a refugee become a member of Congress. These realities coexist with legitimate debate over public safety, foreign policy, and the boundaries of protest—debates that the community engages in, not unlike any other slice of America.
For the broader United States, the exchange speaks to a 2025 in which identity continues to be the field on which many political battles are fought. Immigration policy remains unresolved on the southern border; asylum systems are strained; and social media is a superhighway for emotion, outrage, and rumor. Trump, a master of spectacle, knows how to set the terms. Omar, a figure who embodies both the promise and the contention of the American story, knows how to push back. Voters must decide whether the noise clarifies anything or merely fills the air.
Questions for readers far from Minneapolis
What do we ask of our public figures when they talk about the places we come from—or the places we’ve never seen? How do we handle humor in a political moment when a laugh line can turn into a headline? And how should democracies treat citizens whose life stories straddle continents, languages, and wars—people who, by their very existence, remind us that belonging is an act as much as a birthright?
Some days the culture war feels abstract, a digital storm that will pass. Other days, words ripple into real life—a child teased at school, a small business splashed with graffiti, a family told again to “go back,” as if citizenship were a lease with a landlord’s whim. America knows this script. Whether it learns from it is another question.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
