Donald Trump spoke before 20,000 people at the Target Center in Minneapolis on Thursday night and once again had harsh words for the local congresswoman, Rep. Ilhan Omar.
Omar represents much of the city of Minneapolis, and Trump didn’t spare the rod in criticizing her.
He accused Democrats in Congress of handing “control of the Democratic Party entirely over to the radical left, including Minnesota’s own Rep. Ilhan Omar. … How the hell did that ever happen?” Trump said that everything about her “is a fraud, including her name” — an apparent reference to her complicated marital history — and cited her “virulent anti-Semitic screeds.”
“How do you have such a person representing you in Minnesota?” he asked. “She is a disgrace to our country and she is one of the big reasons I’m going to” win next year in Minnesota.
He expanded his critique to the other three members of the “squad,” other freshmen Democrats who are women of color.
Don’t you love the Strib? A “complicated” marital history is one way to put it. Incest, bigamy, and immigration fraud might be another.
Omar recently filed for divorce from her husband Ahmed Hirsi. She had married Hirsi in 2002 and then the two separated so she could marry another — widely believed to be her brother who lived in England. She brought him over and then divorced him in 2012, remarrying Hirsi in 2018. Rumors of an affair with a D.C. political consultant may have been a reason for her split.
Trump promised Minnesotans in 2016 that “you’ve suffered enough” due to the influx of Somali refugees.
“Here in Minnesota you have seen firsthand the problems caused with faulty refugee vetting, with large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state, without your knowledge,” Trump said in 2016, with thousands of his audience spilling outside of the airport hangar.
“You’ve suffered enough in Minnesota,” he told them.
He now appears to have kept that promise:
Since Trump’s election, the arrival of refugees from Somalia has drastically decreased to a new low due to his travel ban from seven Muslim-majority countries, including Somalia. In 2018, only 48 people came from Somalia to Minnesota. That number was more than 1,400 people in 2016.
Trump’s point all along is that local governments should have more of a say in where refugees are resettled. He said at his rally last night that he had reduced refugee resettlement by 85%.
“Since coming into office I’ve reduced refugee resettlement by 85 percent,” Trump continued to cheers. “And, as you know, maybe especially in Minnesota, I kept another promise: I issued an executive action making clear no refugees will be resettled in any city or any state without the express written consent of that city or that state.”
“You should be able to decide what is best for your own cities and for your own neighborhoods and that’s what you have the right to do right now, and believe me, no other president would be doing that,” Trump continued. “In the Trump administration, we will always protect American families first and that has not been done in Minnesota.”
Whether he’s right or wrong, Trump’s actions have put Minnesota in play for 2020.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member