Donald Trump and his MAGA followers are obsessed with Somali-Americans. The president frequently rants about immigrants from the easternmost African country and their children, using racist rhetoric that would not be out of place at a Ku Klux Klan rally. At a campaign event Monday in Ohio, ostensibly to boost Sen. Jon Husted’s campaign against Democratic challenger Sherrod Brown, Trump fixated at length on Somali-Americans. They “don’t have pants to wear,” he claimed, but then he also expressed anger that they drive “Mercedes Benz and BMWs.” He accused them of being “low IQ” and alleged that they “plundered, ransacked and destroyed” Minnesota, a state with a large Somali immigrant population.

The president’s remarks followed past comments in which he called Somali immigrants “garbage” and said they “aren’t people that work.” Last week, Trump demanded on Truth Social that Minnesotans “fight back,” saying, “Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing.” Just in case his violent implications weren’t clear enough, Trump promised “the Federal Government will come to your rescue” should anyone follow his instructions. 

It’s worth remembering Trump’s history of condoning violence. In January 2025, on his first day back in office, the president pardoned people convicted of violent crimes during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. A year later, his administration took pains to shield officers responsible for the shooting deaths of pro-immigrant protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. 

So it wasn’t too big a surprise when Homeland Security officials raided the home of perhaps the most famous Somali-American in the country, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., on Monday. The action is part of an all-hands-on-deck effort to prove a conspiracy theory that has been percolating on the right for years now, accusing Omar and her family of falsifying her documents to become a U.S. citizen when she was 17. The administration hopes it can denaturalize and deport the progressive lawmaker, whom Trump has deemed “deranged and sick,” repeatedly calling for her to be ejected from the country. 

Odds are that the Trump administration has no case at all against Omar — as is true of thousands of other cases it has lost against immigrants so far. Instead, the raid on the Minnesota congresswoman’s home must be understood more as a campaign stunt by a president desperate to distract from his economic failures and the disastrous war in Iran. Omar herself called the raid “pointless” and “the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.” This isn’t even the first time Trump’s goons have gone hunting for evidence that Omar’s citizenship is illegitimate. On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that, during his first term, Trump made the same demand of immigration officials, but they found “insufficient evidence of wrongdoing” and “eventually abandoned” the search. 

No matter how many insults or threats Trump flings Omar’s way, he cannot hide that the congresswoman is exactly the opposite of the racist stereotypes he traffics in. She is smart, beautiful and hard-working. Unlike Trump, who grew up a spoiled rich kid in Queens, Omar has overcome steep odds to be where she is. At only eight, she fled war-torn Somalia with her family after gunmen attacked their home and lived in a refugee camp in Kenya for four years. Whatever one’s views of her politics, there can be no denying that everything Omar has attained, from her education to her career, has been earned against high odds.

Trump’s accusations against Omar and Somali-Americans in general have more than a whiff of psychological projection to them. He calls her “crooked” and “terrible,” but in reality it’s Trump who was convicted of defrauding New York State to the tune of half a billion dollars. It’s Trump who tried to steal the 2020 election, and it’s Trump who is using gerrymandering and frivolous lawsuits to try to cheat his way out of Republicans losing the midterms. It’s Trump who has amassed over a billion dollars in shadily sourced wealth as president through cryptocurrency schemes. He even regularly cheats at golf because he’s so incapable of playing fair. 

But that all underscores the greater truth about the administration’s attacks on Omar and her fellow Somali-Americans. The success of the congresswoman and her fellow immigrants handily disproves the claim that non-white people are inferior, and instead proves that progressives are right — that the U.S. is better off for allowing people from around the world to live here. For MAGA, the fear of immigration is not about feeling contaminated, but being shown up and exposed as mediocrities in comparison to industrious newcomers. 

Trump’s attack on Omar is reminiscent of his previous accusations that Barack Obama was not a real U.S. citizen. In 2011, Trump, who was then a host on NBC’s “The Apprentice,” started a noisy public campaign demanding the then-president produce his Hawaiian birth certificate, implying that Obama, whose father was Kenyan, could not be a legitimate citizen. Obama eventually did release his birth certificate, but that ultimately didn’t matter to Trump and others who promoted and believed the birther lie, because this was never about the legal definition of “citizen.” It was about the way that the erudite, charismatic Obama revealed the insecurities of the people who, only a few years later, would call themselves “MAGA” by disproving their hopes that whiteness confers an excellence that they, on their own merits, could never produce.

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Trump made this especially clear by also trying to prove Obama secretly had bad grades in college. The president’s psychological projection isn’t subtle. Unsurprisingly, he has not been keen on releasing his own grades and test scores, but he is quick to assure us he’s a super-genius because he was able to tell the difference between a man and a woman on a medical exam to diagnose dementia. 

Another pointed reminder of MAGA’s true fears came recently when Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, tweeted a photo of non-white students celebrating a University of Texas football win and complained, “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” He later whined about the university accepting foreign students, though he had no evidence these young people in the photo were born outside the country and neglected to offer any rational arguments for why the school should discriminate against worthy students from overseas. 

French’s outburst kicked off a debate among right-wing commentators about what they crudely called “the Indian question,” an apparent nod to a Nazi euphemism for antisemitic ideas that eventually led to the Holocaust. This revealed an unbelievably noxious racism, and also served as a tacit admission that concern about immigration is not, despite all the “garbage” talk, about immigrants dragging down the country. The MAGA coalition’s fear is that immigrants will make it a lot harder for mediocre white people to compete for plum jobs and school admissions. While decades of right-wing blather about meritocracy was always a lie, now conservatives are basically admitting it: Racism is a protection racket to shield white D-level students from the consequences of their own laziness.

This understanding exposes why Trump and MAGA have it in for Somali-Americans. Like any group of people, the Somali immigrant community contains good and bad people in it, but on the whole, their very existence is a testament to human tenacity. Like so many waves of refugees before and after, these are people who took huge risks to survive, and many of them, like Omar, are thriving. Even though the community suffers from extensive poverty due in part to discrimination and the few resources refugees from a war-torn country are able to marshal, it has also produced a large number of entrepreneurs. Somali-Americans have higher than average rates of labor participation and contribute an estimated $8 billion a year to Minnesota’s economy alone. Like many immigrant communities, such as Irish and Italians in the early 20th century, the second generation is doing much better economically than their parents. 

In other words, Somali-Americans are living the industrious values that a lot of MAGA types valorize but at which many, especially rich boys like Trump, fall short. This, too, would be fine, if only conservatives could just relax. Part of the American dream is being able to move beyond working that 60-hour week that so many recent immigrants have to put in to survive. There is nothing wrong with being a C student — as long as you don’t take your insecurities out on the A students who just so happen to have darker skin. That’s what makes this racism so baffling. It’s not just that it’s immoral. It’s also a waste of a one precious life to be so angry that someone who looks a little different might be better at some stuff.

The post The real reason MAGA fears Ilhan Omar appeared first on Salon.com.

Two veteran FBI counterterrorism officials were demoted after investigators determined allegedly harassing calls to a top White House aide’s wife did not warrant further investigation, according to multiple reports.

Michael Burgwald, who led counterterrorism operations at the FBI’s Washington Field Office, and his deputy, Courtland Rae, were removed from their leadership positions Friday and reassigned to FBI headquarters.

The shakeup followed an investigation into allegedly threatening and harassing calls received by Katie Miller, a conservative podcaster married to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

A field office team reviewed the calls but found they did not meet the threshold for an FBI investigation and identified no connection to terrorism, CNN reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

That conclusion reportedly caused friction with FBI leadership.

Bloomberg Law, which first reported the demotions, said Washington Field Office leadership was dissatisfied with the pace of the investigation and that the Miller family shared those frustrations. FBI Director Kash Patel was also displeased with the office’s progress, according to the outlet.

The FBI and White House have pushed back on suggestions that the Millers or Patel ordered the personnel changes.

Washington Field Office chief Darren Cox said he made the decision himself.

“Director Patel did not order this decision,” Cox said. “This was a personnel decision made at the Washington field office level alone based on our constant evaluation of mission needs.”

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said the Millers had never met or interacted with Burgwald or Rae.

“Senior leadership at the FBI determined they were stifling investigations into very serious threats and made a unilateral decision to remove them,” Bis said.

Details about the calls themselves have not been made public, leaving unclear what investigators reviewed or why they concluded the messages did not warrant further FBI action.

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The reassignments also remove decades of counterterrorism experience from the Washington office as the United States remains at war with Iran.

Burgwald is a West Point graduate who has received multiple attorney general’s awards. Rae helped oversee the FBI’s response to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Both officials also worked on investigations related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The Millers and their children moved from their Virginia home into military housing last year amid what the White House has described as a campaign of stalking, doxing and threats against the family.

The post “Very serious threats”: FBI officials demoted after Katie Miller theats probe appeared first on Salon.com.

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In the final weeks of 2019, a top fundraiser for Sen. Susan Collins walked into a perilous meeting at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C.

For the first time in her two-decade Senate career, the Republican lawmaker from Maine was in danger of losing her seat. President Donald Trump’s dismal approval ratings were dragging her down in the polls, and she was falling behind her likely 2020 Democratic challenger in fundraising.

Scott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, was on a mission to close that gap. Reed was meeting that day with three executives from a Hawaiian defense contractor, Navatek. A year earlier, Collins had helped their company land a multimillion-dollar Navy research contract in Maine. Now, seated at a coffee shop not far from the U.S. Capitol, Reed asked them for a $500,000 donation.

FBI At the Polls Bc I’m Annoyed

FBI Director Kash Patel appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday and seemed, at least initially, interested in following federal laws against deploying armed federal law enforcement to polling places this fall.

Under federal law, armed federal agents or members of the military cannot be deployed to “any place where a general or special election is held.” That’s established. The reason that Democrats are routinely pressing Patel, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, the head of the Defense Department and other Trump administration officials about whether federal law enforcement officers — whether it’s FBI agents, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers or others — might be deployed to the polls this fall is because President Trump has been agitating around the idea for some time.

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump was vocal about his interest in deploying the military domestically to seize voting machines in counties he thought he should have won. Since then, and in the wake of his second term’s nationwide immigration crackdown — the lethality of which has prompted widespread backlash and protests — his allies outside of the administration have been pushing the White House to send ICE officers to the polls in the midterms. Trump’s allies, like podcaster Steve Bannon, have promoted the line that Democrats win elections only when they cheat and have noncitizen voters cast ballots in federal elections for them. The conspiracy theory has been debunked repeatedly over the years, but Trump’s belief in it has formed the basis of most of his legislative agenda for his second term — and has animated all of his Justice Department’s efforts to seize the constitutionally-protected right to administer elections from the states.

‘Don’t Know That We Can’t Legally Do It’

While Patel initially stuck to boilerplate lines about how he has done nothing but follow the law during his tenure as FBI chief, he also suggested that he thinks it is not necessarily illegal for FBI agents to be sent to polling places. It appears he may have been arguing that agents are allowed to follow up on violations of law, a line that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has used when asked if ICE agents might be sent to the polls. (“The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” Mullin said earlier this month. “If we’re serving a warrant we will be where we need to be.”)

“I don’t know that we can’t legally do it,” Patel said in response to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) asking him to commit to not sending FBI agents to the polls in November. Patel said that he would follow the law and keep agents and intelligence analysts stationed at FBI field offices in case there were any election security-related issues to address.

“The FBI will follow the law,” Patel said. “If there’s a reason to go there, because there’s been a violation of law, we will, otherwise we won’t.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) questioned him about Justice Department policy that restricts federal law enforcement activities or investigations at polling places on Election Day.

“Are you aware of the Justice Department’s long-standing guidance that states that FBI agents cannot conduct investigations inside polling places on Election Day, and that federal prosecutors have no authority to send FBI special agents or deploy U.S. Marshals to polling places?” Klobuchar asked.

“I’m aware,” Patel replied.

“Will you commit to following clear federal law and DOJ policy and not deploy federal agents to polling places?” she asked.

“We will always follow the law and the guidelines,” he said.

But when Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) began questioning Patel about the matter, Patel started wildly obfuscating.