Opinion: Trump’s “garbage” slur against Somali Americans shows how fascist politics take root
President Donald Trump’s latest attack on Somali Americans — calling a small, visible community “garbage” during a Cabinet meeting, with Vice President J.D. Vance pounding the table in approval — is not a gaffe. It is a governing philosophy made plain: divide the country into “real” Americans and internal enemies, cast cruelty as strength, and test how far institutions will bend to accommodate it.
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This is not a semantic debate about tone. When a president publicly dehumanizes a community of citizens, the question is whether everyone else — courts, universities, mayors, corporate leaders, and voters — will accept it as the price of doing business.
Somali Americans are an easy target in the culture wars: a numerically small, visually identifiable Black Muslim community concentrated in Minnesota and a handful of other states. Many arrived as refugees or through family reunification, then naturalized at high rates, work across essential sectors, pay taxes, run businesses, vote, and raise children. The reality of Somali life in the United States bears no resemblance to the caricature. But that has rarely stopped demagogues.
Calling a community “garbage” draws a bright line between an imagined “we” and a stigmatized “they,” transforming neighbors into pollutants. It tells the public that the issue is not wages, housing or health care — it is the supposed contamination of the body politic by people whose presence is framed as an affront. The move is textbook. So is what tends to follow.
In the weeks around the slur, the administration moved to end Temporary Protected Status for Somali nationals, lowered the refugee admissions ceiling toward historic lows, and revived a nineteen-country travel ban that includes Somalia. In Minnesota, home to one of the largest Somali communities, roughly a hundred federal agents were dispatched to the Twin Cities for an immigration operation focused on Somali neighborhoods. Unmarked cars idled near Somali malls. Business owners reported customers staying home. Parents kept children inside, not because of crime, but because they didn’t know when or where a sweep might land. Rhetoric primes enforcement; it changes what officials think is permissible and what the public will tolerate.
Americans know how this story goes. Our museums and textbooks preserve the receipts. In low moments, the country has treated immigrant communities as suspect populations, loosened legal constraints in the name of safety, and counted on respectable people to look away.
- Irish Catholics were lampooned as papist infiltrators in the 19th century.
- Germans were branded “enemy aliens” during World War I, forced to register and sometimes interned.
- Japanese Americans — two-thirds of them citizens — were incarcerated under Executive Order 9066 during World War II, as posters and editorials depicted them as vermin to be trapped.
Those episodes took place under different ideologies, but they shared a pattern: select a minority, sell it as a menace, relax the rules, and rely on the majority’s rationalizations. The difference now is that none of this can be excused as ignorance. We have the photographs, the apologies, the congressional resolutions. We know what dehumanizing language does — and who bears the cost.
What is on the table today has a name. Fascism is not a European museum piece. It is a style of politics organized around a boundary between “the people” and their enemies, a willingness to discard legal limits when they are inconvenient, and a ritual of public cruelty to bind the faithful. The president’s remarks fit that architecture. So do the policy moves that shadow them.
Why Somalis, and why now? Because manufacturing a scapegoat is easier than solving hard problems. When prices remain high and wages stagnant, it is simpler to point at migrants than explain failed policy. Mocking hijabs is easier than fixing health care. Raging about a Somali mall is easier than admitting that tariffs and chaos hurt farmers and small businesses. For an administration struggling to deliver on economic claims, a Black Muslim community in Minnesota is a convenient foil.
None of this changes the basic facts about Somali Americans. Our names appear on voter rolls, property records and business licenses. Our work shows up in warehouses and hospitals, on trucking routes and factory shifts. Elders who survived state collapse, warlords, famine and camps did not cross oceans to be undone by a president’s slur at a Cabinet table. They will keep working, praying, opening businesses and sending remittances that keep families alive through drought and violence back home. They are not going anywhere.
The burden now lies with everyone else. Fascism does not take hold because one man talks like a fascist; it takes hold when enough people decide that talk is an acceptable premium on power. It advances when universities swallow their statements for fear of donors, when city councils call raids someone else’s jurisdiction, when corporate leaders mute principles to protect share price, when neighbors who know better avoid hard conversations at work.
There is nothing complicated about the moral test. You do not have to share Rep. Ilhan Omar’s politics — or anyone’s — to reject a president demeaning a community as “garbage.” You do not need a political science degree to insist that dignified treatment is not conditional on a leader’s mood. If the United States believes its own story — that people can come from anywhere and become American — that promise must hold when it is hardest: when the people in question are Black, Muslim, visibly foreign and politically unpopular. Either it protects them, or it was never a promise at all.
Trump’s words were disgusting. More importantly, they were clarifying. They reveal an understanding of power not as a responsibility to protect all citizens, but as a prerogative to decide which citizens are worth protecting. That is the instinct to name, and to resist — before language hardens into policy and stigma into structure.
Somali Americans are doing our part: studying, working, voting, paying taxes, caring for families here and abroad. The question is whether institutions that claim to care about democracy, pluralism and the rule of law will do theirs. You do not have to like us to say we are not garbage. You only have to insist that in this country, no president gets to decide which human beings are disposable.
That is the test in front of us. It is as large as the republic’s future.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
