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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.
“I don’t want ’em in our country,” Trump said of ethnic Somalis, about 80,000 of whom live in the Minneapolis area. “Their country’s no good for a reason.” The comments echoed recent posts from the president’s powerful adviser Stephen Miller, who has largely taken over immigration policy. Referring to what he called “the lie of mass migration” in a November 27 post on X, Miller cast doubt on the possibility of assimilation, and suggested that immigrants from troubled countries would contaminate America with a kind of genetic or ontological incapacity for democratic governance. “At scale, migrants and their descendants represent the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands,” Miller wrote.
In the cabinet meeting, Trump went on to specifically disparage Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota – who came to the US as a child refugee from Somalia and became a citizen more than 25 years ago. Speaking of Omar and those like her, Trump referred to Somali immigrants as “garbage” and suggested that they were unfit for America. “We’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking garbage into our country.”
“These are people,” the president said, “who do nothing but complain … When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in their country. Let them go back to where they come from and fix it,” Trump said. He added, inaccurately, that “these aren’t people who work”. JD Vance banged on the table with a kind of juvenile enthusiasm as Trump issued his bigoted tirade. At a rally on Tuesday in Pennsylvania, the president continued his diatribe, saying of Omar: “We ought to get her the hell out.”
Trump has long been vocally racist, disparaging Black immigrants in particular in sneering and often vulgar terms. During his first term, he posited that the United States should not accept immigrants from what he called “shithole countries” – by which he meant Haiti and some African nations – and said that he would rather receive immigrants from Norway, remarks he boasted about at the Tuesday rally. In his second term, his administration has radically reoriented American refugee resettlement policy, closing the nation’s doors to displaced persons from places like Somalia and giving preference, among the much-decreased number of refugee admissions spots, to white Afrikaners.
For the Somali American community in Minnesota, the crackdowns have been devastating. ICE has been targeting Somali immigrants in the area; reports suggest that many in the community are afraid to leave their homes, meaning that local businesses are suffering.
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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Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
