Rep. Ilhan Omar And Somali Immigrants Aren’t ‘Garbage.’ Trump’s Presidency Is

First, it was “piggy.”
Then it was “ugly inside and out.”
And now, our Racist-in-Chief says Rep. Ilhan Omar is “garbage.”

Garbage.

When a sitting president calls a Black woman in Congress garbage, that isn’t shade. It’s a political act designed to tell the country which kind of people are considered disposable. First, you humiliate. Then you degrade. Then you dispose. This is how the public is trained to normalize cruelty and even mass murder.

Now, turn the camera around.

Because Donald Trump wants you staring at Rep. Omar like she’s the spectacle. But don’t fall for it. Look at him. Look at his unraveling in real time. The scrambled sentences. The vacant swerves. The chronic sleepiness. The rages that land before the thought. 

You want to talk about garbage? Garbage is a politics of grievance and paranoia. Garbage is a governing style that sells stupidity and lies as leadership. Garbage is a movement that feeds on fear and racism. Garbage is a presidency that weaponizes ignorance and calls it “truth.”

And since Trump loves to puff out his chest and demonize immigrants from non-white countries by calling them garbage, let’s talk about his actual lineage.

He is not some native-bred steward of American virtue. His family came the way millions of European immigrants did: through poverty, displacement, chance, and illegally. 

His father’s people left Bavaria as part of a wave of German migration into a United States that did not particularly want them. Germans were treated as dirty outsiders, mocked for their accents, considered dangerous, unassimilable, blamed for labor unrest, and accused of corrupting American culture with beer halls, unions, and foreign loyalties. During wars and downturns, they became suspects. They were papered, watched, and mocked. 

Sound familiar? It should. Because it’s the same script Trump runs now on brown and Black families, just with updated targets.

His mother came from the Isle of Lewis, one of the poorest, most isolated regions of Scotland at the time. People did not flee that island because it was thriving. They fled because there was nothing to eat and nothing to inherit. When she arrived in New York, she was a maid scrubbing other people’s floors to survive in a country that did not roll out a red carpet for her. 

That’s the part of the story Trump never tells about his own immigrant origins.

If America had treated his parents the way he demands it treat others, his family story would’ve ended in factory soot and ledger ink. Germans were once the immigrants “taking jobs.” Scots were folded into cheap labor and told to be grateful they were allowed to breathe American air. His people were indexed, inspected, and doubted. His bloodline benefited from a country that let poor Europeans in and let them become American, and now he stands at that same door, snarling at anyone darker than his reflection.

What’s really underneath the sneer at immigrants is not pride, it’s shame. A large share of white Americans descends from Europeans who arrived here as castoffs. They were the rural poor, the famine-driven, the landless, the religious outcasts, the criminals, and the industrial scraps of old empires that had no use for them. 

That truth never got mourned, so it got rewritten. 

So, “refugee” became “pioneer.” “Survival” became “superiority.” And now, when today’s immigrants show up with the same hunger and raw need their grandparents carried, something cracks. The scorn isn’t about borders, it’s about reflection. Immigrants mirror an origin story they were never taught to metabolize without shame. So instead of confronting it, they flinch. Instead of remembering, they perform dominance. And when you say these facts out loud, they get quiet. Not because you’re wrong, but because you’ve pulled on the thread holding their mythology together. Silence is what happens when an identity built on entitlement runs face-first into its own forgotten poverty and demonization.

When Trump calls Rep. Ilhan Omar “garbage,” the confession underneath it is projection. He’s throwing his own unprocessed ancestry at her like a rock. What really rattles him is that she embodies the same American miracle his family depended on, except she makes no apology for it. Where his people arrived quiet and desperate, she arrived brilliant and unashamed. And he cannot stand that contrast. 

And let’s not forget that this is the same man who said Somalia “stinks.” Trump has never been to Somalia, and he’s never set foot on the African continent as president. And yet, he talks about African air like he’s some global sommelier of oxygen. He’s never stood in Mogadishu and breathed the air. So what, exactly, is he smelling? 

But let’s talk about what actually smells in America: corroded pipes, chemical fires, and a million quiet emergencies tolerated as normal. In Flint, Michigan, families still live with the damage of lead in their water years after officials poisoned it. A few months ago, the EPA finally lifted an emergency order on the city’s water. In Jackson, Mississippi, whole neighborhoods can’t trust the tap at all. In East Palestine, Ohio, a derailment bathed a town in toxic smoke and vinyl chloride while residents were told not to worry about what they could smell. Along the Gulf Coast, refineries and petrochemical plants haze the air with benzene and flares while asthma rates climb and cancer clusters whisper. Across Appalachia, abandoned mines bleed acid into creeks, and in farm states, pesticides drift through schoolyards. Add overdoses, decaying bridges, overwhelmed ERs, and housing that costs more than survival itself, and tell me again who lives in a “stinking” country. The rot here in the U.S. isn’t foreign. It’s infrastructural. It’s environmental. It’s political. 

Trump also said, his words, not mine, that Somalians “contribute nothing.” He is lying.

In the United States, refugees, Somali Americans included, are not economic drains. They are economic engines. A national analysis by the American Immigration Council found that refugees in the U.S. earned $93.6 billion in household income in a single year and paid $25 billion in taxes, money that flows into housing, transportation, education, food, and local businesses.

In cities like Minneapolis, Columbus, and Seattle, Somali-owned businesses have revitalized commercial corridors, created jobs, and restored neighborhoods other investors abandoned. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis documented how Somali entrepreneurs in Minnesota turned failing storefronts into thriving hubs that now anchor entire districts. When Trump says “nothing,” the cash registers, paychecks, and tax receipts say otherwise.

And the contribution doesn’t stop at America’s borders. The global Somali diaspora is one of the most important economic lifelines keeping Somalia from collapse. Remittances from Somalis abroad send about $1.3 billion a year into Somalia. This is money that pays for food, medicine, school fees, and rent for millions of families. The World Bank estimates that remittances make up as much as one quarter of Somalia’s entire economy in some years. Without diaspora money, hospitals would close, schools would shut down, and hunger would explode.

Humanitarian organizations have noted that Somali remittances routinely outpace international aid. The Rift Valley Institute reports that private money from Somalis abroad does more to stabilize daily life in Somalia than the entire foreign-aid system combined. Trump calls that “nothing.” But the people surviving on those dollars call it life.

Even the political contribution is measurable. Somali Americans vote, run for office, build mosques and community centers, and show up for school boards and city councils. PBS documented how Somali communities in Minnesota have become one of the state’s most civically engaged populations, reshaping local politics, organizing mutual aid, and demanding a voice in policy that affects them. That’s not “nothing.” That’s civic participation at work.

The Center for American Progress found that refugees and immigrants consistently increase employment rates over time, start businesses at high levels, and strengthen regional economies. Somali families, like most immigrant communities, move from survival to stability to ownership. This is the exact pattern that once described Irish families, Italian families, Jewish families, and Trump’s own ancestors.

The facts speak for themselves. Somali Americans contribute to the U.S. GDP. They contribute to the tax base. They contribute to neighborhoods. They fund entire countries abroad. They rebuild war-torn communities with private money where governments fail. They are employers, investors, voters, and lifesavers.

“Nothing” is a slur that erases labor, survival, billions of dollars of economic activity, and millions of acts of care.

What Trump calls “nothing” is the work of people stitching together two nations at once. A people paying American taxes while feeding Somali families abroad. A people building U.S. businesses while rebuilding schools overseas. Creating wealth here while preventing starvation over there.

That is not garbage. Rep. Ilhan Omar isn’t trash. The Somali people aren’t refuse. The waste is the politics that tries to throw them away. And the stench is coming from the fetid mouth that says it.

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.

SEE ALSO:

Black D.C. Is The Stage For Trump’s Authoritarian Rehearsal

Trump’s MRI Is A Press Release And Narrative Control

Trump’s South African Refugee Program Is ‘Whites Only’