Trump and his MAGA allies need individuals like Omar to fade from this nation—they usually hate her for refusing to take action.
Consultant. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) walks towards the Capitol on December 10, 2025.
(Andrew Harnik / Getty Photos)
President Donald Trump went to Pennsylvania final week to provide a speech about “affordability.” It was bought as an economic system speech, which is to say it was purported to be about cash and the way individuals don’t have sufficient of it.
Trump did discuss how the mathematics isn’t his fault, and about whose fault the math is. He even introduced a brand new coverage designed to make the math even worse. Fairly bog-standard American political fare.
However he additionally did one thing else, which turned out to be simply as American as that different stuff: scapegoating rather than solutions, grievance politics rather than coverage, and gutter racism. The speech was, in that acquainted Trumpian approach, about permission: who will get to be right here, who will get to be counted, who will get to be handled as American. And, for example this, Trump reached for certainly one of his favourite targets: Minnesota Consultant Ilhan Omar, a Somali American citizen whose presence on this nation has infuriated Trump for practically a decade (and for whom I used to work as a political communications operative):
I really like this Ilhan Omar, regardless of the hell her identify is, with the little turban. I really like her. She is available in, does nothing however bitch…I like it. She involves our nation and she or he’s at all times complaining concerning the structure…she ought to get the hell out, throw her the hell out.
Proper on cue, the viewers performed the refrain. An previous traditional. “Send her back.”
As I mentioned, Trump’s hatred of Omar is nothing new. However his obsessive, virtually devotional hostility in direction of her remains to be notable. What’s it about Ilhan Omar that makes the MAGA motion so apoplectic?
You can begin with the plain: She’s a Black Muslim girl, a refugee-turned-citizen, a residing image of the demographic and political modifications the precise has constructed its trendy id round resisting. However there’s a deeper motive, too. The explanation the assaults maintain coming even when the “scandals” don’t land: Omar collapses the precise’s most helpful story with nothing extra unique than her continued existence as a working member of Congress.
Present Situation
Take into consideration that “ship her again” chant. It isn’t simply ugly. It’s tutorial. It’s the gang rehearsing the concept some individuals’s membership within the US might be revoked purely due to what they seem like, the place they arrive from, or whom they pray to. When you see all this, you begin to see the entire enterprise—Trump’s assault, the recycled lie, the ritual chant—not as spontaneous outrage however as equipment. The smear is the technique: make belonging conditional. Hold the goal completely on probation. The actual message is to everybody watching: Some Individuals are at all times provisional.
And Ilhan Omar refuses to just accept that. She refuses to observe the script Trump needs her to.
The script says immigrants arrive solely to take. The script says Muslims can’t be loyal. It says refugees are everlasting visitors. It says “actual” Individuals are the individuals who by no means need to say they’re actual. Omar, unhelpfully, retains being a member of the Home of Representatives anyway. And he or she retains doing the unglamorous job of governing, which is, in a more healthy democracy, purported to be the least shocking factor on the planet.
Right here’s the half that by no means survives the nationwide caricature: in Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District, Ilhan just isn’t a cable-news cipher or an argument-starter. To individuals who reside in her district, she’s “their man.” Regionally, her electoral file is what political consultants name “not an issue.” She wins, and she or he will get stuff achieved.
She is widespread the place she really needs to be widespread: among the many individuals who can hearth her.
One small, clarifying element about Omar is that she’s a real fight sports activities fan. She posts about boxing with the form of family-memory specificity that doesn’t come from a PR brainstorm. Truly, she brought it into work this month, urgent a UFC govt in a listening to about fighter pay and protections.
I point out this as a result of fight sports activities train a lesson that politicians, for some motive, retains pretending to not know. When you again up from an even bigger bully, it doesn’t make the bully gentler. It normally simply tells them the tactic works. Omar doesn’t swing wild, however she additionally doesn’t retreat simply because the opposite facet is louder, richer, or surrounded by cameras. She understands rounds, and she or he understands that composure just isn’t the identical factor as concession.
Minneapolis and its inner-ring suburbs are a sophisticated place of union households and public-sector employees, service employees and college students, immigrants and multigenerational Midwesterners. Inconveniently for the precise, the fifth appears loads like “common America.” And people common Individuals, the individuals coping with faculty funding and healthcare billing and public security and transit, and, simply this month, rumors and pictures and citywide nerves about masked thugs with plate carriers and computerized weapons, to not point out the annual existential disaster of municipal snow removing— these individuals maintain selecting Omar.
A consultant’s job is to ship. She does.
I understand how simple it’s to sound naïve saying that out loud, as if “delivering” is a few quaint relic of civics class. However I used to work carefully with Omar (and for her predecessor, Keith Ellison, who was identified far and broad for this similar motive). I’ve seen the tempo up shut, the way in which the work doesn’t finish when the cameras do. The conferences that run lengthy, the constituent issues that don’t resolve cleanly, the native priorities that require not only a assertion however persistent, repetitive follow-through.
Susceptible to stanning too onerous, I’m not going to speak about how brave Omar is for doing the job she does, given how genuinely dangerous it can be for a person like her to do it. I’ll let her constituents and her work converse for themselves.
That steadiness isn’t just temperament. It’s a governing model. It’s a refusal to deal with the district as a backdrop. For Omar, the fifth district isn’t a model; it’s a accountability. And he or she approaches it like somebody who believes that illustration is a verb. She holds at the least one town hall a month. Which is strictly why the assault machine can’t cease.
So what explains the hole between the caricature and the district actuality?
One rationalization is that the caricature is made for an viewers that may by no means see the work—by no means sit through a community meeting, by no means watch a district workplace navigate an immigration case or a advantages nightmare, by no means speak to the nonprofit director who wanted federal {dollars} to keep a community center open or keep programs thousands depend on alive. For that viewers, Omar turns into a logo first and a politician second (and a human being usually under no circumstances). She turns into a display for anxieties about id, energy, and alter.
However the different rationalization, the one which issues, is that Omar’s effectiveness is exactly what makes her so threatening to the individuals who want her to be a fraud. It’s one factor to focus on an immigrant politician who appears remoted in Washington, alienated from constituents, clinging to a seat by a thread. It’s one other factor totally to focus on somebody who retains demonstrating what illustration is meant to seem like: displaying up, listening, preventing, delivering, after which doing it once more subsequent week.
That is the half that will get erased by the caricature. The suitable wants Omar to be a parasite. The fact is extra harmful to them: She’s a legislator doing the job, effectively, in public, with a base that notices.
None of this implies you need to agree with Ilhan Omar on each concern. The purpose is to know what is definitely taking place when the president makes use of the presidency to revive previous lies about an elected congresswoman, and a crowd solutions with deportation fantasies.
When the nation’s strongest political determine turns a Somali Muslim congresswoman right into a public enemy, the consequence just isn’t restricted to cable information. It spills into colleges and workplaces and public areas the place individuals study, once more, that harassment might be framed as patriotism, that cruelty might be laundered as “concern,” that the road between “politics” and “risk” is thinner than we wish to admit.
And in that surroundings, there’s a lure that Democrats, particularly the celebration’s self-appointed grown-ups, maintain getting into. The lure is to deal with the smear as a tone downside. To sentence the mantra, deplore the bigotry, after which pivot to scolding Omar for being too sharp, too polarizing, an excessive amount of—too one thing—as if the precise is solely reacting to her model slightly than to her existence as an American who refuses to be conditional.
However there isn’t any model of Ilhan Omar that may fulfill a politics premised on conditional belonging. The situation is the purpose.
If you wish to discuss what’s “un-American,” begin right here: a politics that treats citizenship as revocable primarily based on id. A politics that hears “ship her again” and doesn’t recoil—not as a result of the goal is Ilhan Omar however as a result of the goal is the premise of equal membership in a democracy. A politics that insists some Individuals should continually audition for belonging whereas others are granted it by default, like an inheritance.
Fashionable
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Omar’s biography just isn’t a loophole within the American story. It is the American story, instructed in a approach that makes sure individuals livid: An individual arrives, survives, turns into a part of a neighborhood, earns belief, then leads. There’s a custom in Midwestern politics—name it prairie populism; name it neighborliness with tooth—that claims democracy just isn’t a spectator sport and that illustration is meant to seem like solidarity, not hierarchy. Paul Wellstone’s plainspoken ethical math, “All of us do higher after we all do higher,” is the other of the zero-sum worldview that powers chants like “ship her again.”
That’s why the obsession is so intense. The suitable can survive coverage losses. What it can not survive, at the least not with out escalating, is a residing rebuttal: a refugee turned citizen who retains successful within the Midwest, who retains doing the work, who retains proving that the America they mourn just isn’t the one America there’s.
Which is why they want Ilhan Omar to be a villain.
Not as a result of she’s uniquely harmful however as a result of she’s uniquely clarifying. If she might be an American, absolutely, loudly, unapologetically, then the entire nativist story collapses. If her constituents can know her as principled and efficient whereas the nationwide proper sells her as a overseas contaminant, then it turns into apparent that the nationwide story isn’t describing actuality; it’s making an attempt to fabricate it.
Omar’s opponents need an America the place belonging is conditional. The fifth district retains insisting in any other case. And Ilhan Omar, in probably the most American approach attainable, retains displaying as much as combat for the individuals who despatched her there.
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Editor and writer, The Nation
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