Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar accused President Trump of having an unhealthy obsession with her, one that requires medical attention, after he referred to the Somali native as “garbage.”
“We can go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Trump said during a Tuesday Cabinet meeting that touched on many topics, including immigration.
“Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage,” Trump added, attacking the entire Somali diaspora in the United States.
Omar’s family fled Somalia to escape the civil war when she was 8 years old, according to her House of Representatives biography page. After spending four years in a Kenyan refugee camp, her family arrived in New York in 1995 before eventually settling in Minneapolis.
Trump — who’s said he’s never met Omar — has verbally attacked the 43-year old lawmaker on multiple occasions.
During his first term in 2019, he accused her of professing “love” for al-Qaeda and asked why politicians from “totally broken” countries don’t return to their homelands to fix the “crime-infested places from which they came.” In September of this year, he compared Omar to “scum.”
He picked up the pace again this week after conservative activist Christopher Rufo published unsubstantiated allegations, citing unnamed sources, that money stolen from Minnesota programs has gone to al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda-linked group that controls parts of Somalia.
Omar punched back at Trump’s comments on social media Tuesday.
“His obsession with me is creepy,” she posted on X. “I hope he gets the help he desperately needs.”
According to the president, Somalis “contribute nothing” and shouldn’t be allowed into the Unites States.
“Their country is no good for a reason,” the president said Tuesday. “Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”
His comments came after he vowed last week to send Somalis “back to where they came from,” and claimed that Minnesota, home to the United States’ largest Somali community, is “a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.”
With News Wire Services
