ArcaMax

Sometimes one crisis seems to lead to another for President Trump — and he’s got plenty of trouble brewing.

For months now, Trump's approval rating has taken a beating for the knock-on effects of the government shutdown and the ongoing Epstein files fiasco. In November, his administration came under fire over newly reported details about the airstrikes on purported drug traffickers in the Caribbean, which seem to indicate that wounded people were deliberately killed in violation of the conventions of war. Trump also responded to the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington by an Afghani refugee (who had formerly worked with American intelligence in Afghanistan) by suspending all Afghani immigration cases, leading many critics to decry the move as collective punishment.

Amid all this anguish, Trump took the opportunity at a cabinet meeting Tuesday to double down on collective punishment against another immigrant group that he doesn't like: Somali Americans.

On November 21, Trump posted on social media that he was revoking Temporary Protected Status for Somalis living in Minnesota.

"They contribute nothing,” Trump told reporters in a rambling tirade in the Tuesday cabinet meeting. “I don't want them in our country.”

Trump further averred that the war-torn East African country from which they fled "stinks" and that they are "garbage."

Even for Trump, who once infamously dismissed African nations as "shithole countries," the malevolence and vulgarity of his anti-Somali outbursts was stunning.

And what end did he imagine was being served?

Casting a broad shadow of suspicion on immigrants, especially from nonwhite and Islamic nations, has been a years-long pattern for Trump and his deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller.

But the Somali angle likely has much to do with the recent Trump administration tack of punishing blue states and Democratic political leaders. The largest Somali expatriate community in the U.S. resides in Minnesota, home to Rep. Ilhan Omar and Gov. Tim Walz, two favorite objects of Trump invective.

Some 80,000 people of Somali birth or ancestry reside in the state, and the vast majority are U.S. citizens. Omar emigrated from Somalia in 1995 as a child.

Minnesota's Somali community has taken a public relations hit recently following reports of the U.S. Department of Justice's prosecution of individuals involved in a wide-ranging scheme to defraud Minnesota and federal government programs during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

As much as $250 million was bilked by upward of 75 defendants, and the DOJ investigation, started during the Biden administration, centers on a nonprofit group called Feeding Our Future, which worked with the Minnesota Department of Education and U.S. Department of Agriculture to distribute meals to children.

The defendants, who are mostly but not all members of the Somali community, submitted false invoices and meal count sheets, set up bogus programs for autistic children, and took or gave kickbacks for participation in the fraud.

It's disgraceful behavior, and it's good that the fraudsters are being prosecuted. However, Trump could not help himself from taking the outrage across the line of collective calumny.

Picking up on allegations by Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, and Ryan Thorpe, a reporter for the institute's City Journal, that money stolen from Minnesota programs has gone to al-Shabab, an al-Qaida-linked militant group that controls parts of Somalia, Trump branded the Minnesota Somali community "a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity" and vowed to send them "back to where they came from."

Rufo's claims, you won't be surprised to learn, are unsubstantiated. A former U.S. attorney for Minnesota told the Minnesota Star Tribune that the defendants his office prosecuted “were looking to get rich, not fund overseas terrorism.”

But Trump and the MAGA faithful never let facts — or, to be charitable, the absence of evidence — get in the way of a good conspiracy theory about immigrants.

"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. “Ilhan Omar is garbage. She's garbage! Her friends are garbage!"

In response to the president, Omar fortunately kept her cool. “I hope,” she said graciously, “he gets the help he desperately needs.”

From your lips to God's ear, Congresswoman.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at clarence47page@gmail.com.)

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