Trump’s anti-Somali tirade is a shocking new low
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/11/trumps-anti-somali-racism-ilhan-omar
Last week, as ICE agents descended on Minneapolis and St Paul, Minnesota’s Twin Cities, and members of migrant communities there retreated into hiding, Donald Trump unleashed a wave of bigotry against the area’s Somali population in a moment of vitriol that was shockingly racist even by his own very low standards. Rousing himself to animation at the tail end of a televised 2 December cabinet meeting during which he sometimes appeared to be struggling to stay awake, the president disparaged Somali immigrants, many of whom are refugees from the country’s long-running civil conflict, as ungrateful and unfit for residence in the United States.
And yet for all the seriousness of his rhetoric and actions, Trump’s racist outburst may be yet another sign of his weakness. Trump has frequently returned to racism at moments when he is on the political back foot, as he has been in recent months following persistently bad economic news, the repeated release of new information from formerly classified documents that highlights Trump’s former closeness with the dead child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and the emergence of fractures within his own coalition as alliances break down and ambitious underlings begin calculating how to best secure their own futures after the end of his term.
In such turbulent political times for Trump, white supremacist grievance, xenophobic sentiment and efforts to rally his base against a shared enemy have been a tried and true strategy. But they are perhaps yielding diminishing returns. While once – perhaps earlier in Trump’s time at the forefront of national politics – such racist comments could have provoked a news cycle of liberal outrage that served to stoke domestic conflict and satisfy the right wing id, now, a decade into Trumpism, racist comments from the president have lost some of their novelty. Even Ilhan Omar, the target of Trump’s ire who has faced serious threats to her safety after some of his comments in the past, seemed unimpressed. Responding to Trump’s tirade in a post on social media, she said, “I hope he gets the help he desperately needs.”
Hate seems to be about all that the president has to offer his voters. With his approval rating continuing to fall, the economy still staggering and his own effectiveness waning, he is going back to the well of bigotry and resentment that has driven his previous successes. In so doing, he will inflict indignity and suffering on innocent people; he always does. But that deep well of white, working-class, popular anger that has served Trump so well in the past seems to be running dry. More and more, it’s Trump himself that people are angry at.
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