Trump’s Hateful Oval Office Rant About Somali Immigrants Shines a Harsh Light on the Cowardice of His Cronies

Screenshot via Fox News.

President Donald Trump launched into a rant Wednesday attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and other Somali immigrants, saying they should be “thrown the hell out of our country” and not allowed to serve in Congress, an unhinged moment that revealed not just the president’s animosity towards a group of Americans, but the cowardice and complicity of the cronies gathered around him from Congress and his cabinet.

On Tuesday, Trump attacked Omar as “garbage” and “a terrible person,” and expanded his vitriol to all Somali immigrants, declaring “I don’t want them in our country” because “they contribute nothing.” His comments were — rightfully — loudly criticized as racist.

Trump aggressively defended his comments during a Q&A session with reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday.

It’s an exhausted cliché at this point that Trump frequently says things that would be front-page headlines and probably career-ending moves for any other politician. The above video clip is just two-and-a-half minutes long but contains multiple examples of such comments:

Somalia is “not even a nation” but “just people walking around killing each other.”

He accused Omar of marrying her brother, a baseless rumor that lacks supporting evidence and one that she vociferously denied as “absolutely false and ridiculous” when it first circulated around 2016.

Omar “shouldn’t be allowed to be a congresswoman…and she should be thrown the hell out of our country.”

“Most of those people” — meaning the Somali immigrants — “have destroyed Minnesota” and made it a “hellhole.”

“The Somalians should be out of here. They have destroyed our country.”

“Somalia is considered by many to be the worst country on Earth. I don’t know. I haven’t been there. I won’t be there any time soon. I hope. But what Somalia — what the Somalian people have done to Minnesota is not even believable.”

Omar “should not be — and her friends shouldn’t be allowed — frankly, they shouldn’t even be allowed to be congresspeople, okay? They shouldn’t even be allowed to be congresspeople because they don’t represent the interests of our country.”

Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and moved to New York in 1995 when her family received asylum, becoming a U.S. citizen in 2000 at the age of 17. There are plenty of valid reasons to criticize her for her own inflammatory rhetoric or over policy disagreements, but she is a citizen and was duly elected to Congress by the people of her district.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) unleashed a similar screed against Omar in a series of social media posts in September, openly calling for the Minnesota Democrat’s citizenship to be revoked and to have her deported back to Somalia, plus pushing the baseless accusations about marrying her brother.

Mace was sharply criticized for her posts, but it is an entirely different level when the rhetoric is coming from the President of the United States, and one who is in the midst of a highly controversial immigration crackdown, who is seeking to end birthright citizenship, and who has repeatedly voiced support for revoking the citizenship of his political opponents and critics.

And what did the group of a little more than a dozen people around Trump do when he made these comments?

Pretty much nothing.

Just crickets and frozen smiles from the cabinet members, members of Congress including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and corporate executives standing there gathered around the president, seated at the Resolute Desk, as he declared that an entire group of immigrant U.S. citizens should not only be barred from Congress but kicked out of the country.

Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation and former reality TV star on MTV’s Real World, even grinned as Trump said Somalia was “considered by many to be the worst country on Earth” and he hoped he wouldn’t have to be there anytime soon.

After more than a decade of Trump being a force in the American political scene, there is a temptation to shrug this off as The Latest Crazy Thing Grandpa Donnie Said™, but that would be naïve.

The Trump administration has dedicated a lot of time, energy, and staff to attempt to radically mutate our entire immigration system in ways that aren’t far off from the president’s off-the-cuff rants.

Our federal government isn’t just cracking down on the “dangerous” illegal immigrants, the drug dealers, gang members, rapists, and murderers that his campaign used as bogeymen. The Department of Homeland Security’s own data showed that 73 percent of people booked into ICE detention facilities since the beginning of October had no criminal convictions whatsoever, and only 5 percent had any violent criminal convictions.

They’re sending masked ICE agents in plainclothes to harass and detain people for looking Hispanic, including U.S. citizens and military veterans. They’re arresting and deporting people with green cards, who have had legal work permits, who are married to citizens, and who have shown up to their immigration court dates as required for years without trouble; this is literally the definition of low-risk immigrants who are “doing it the right way.”

Asylum has been sharply restricted — except for white Afrikaners from South Africa.

DHS’s social media posts keep featuring slogans and memes that “sounded better in the original German,” to borrow a quip that the late Texas journalist Molly Ivins used to denounce Pat Buchanan’s 1992 RNC speech.

So, yes, it does matter when Trump declares that an entire group of immigrants — legal U.S. citizens — should be summarily stripped of their citizenship and deported.

It does matter when the President of the United States adopts the authoritarian playbook to divide the populace into an “us vs. them” and target a group of people he can cast as foreign or “other” to blame for our problems (many of which his own administration has caused or exacerbated).

Trump’s words in the Oval Office were the direct antithesis of our national motto, E pluribus unum (out of many, one), and the response from the cabinet members and members of Congress standing behind him — who took an oath to support and defend the Constitution — was silence.

And silence is complicity.

If we don’t want this chapter of American history to be recorded as “First they came for the Somalis…” then it is incumbent upon those around the president, who have influence in this administration and in Congress, to speak up.

Watch the clip above via Fox News.

UPDATE: Retired NY Daily News reporter Helen Kennedy posted a list on her Bluesky account of the people who attended the Oval Office presser with Trump. “I think it should be noted who stood there,” she wrote.

OK I’ve put together the list. Shame on all of them:

Ford CEO Jim Farley
Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa
General Motors plant manager John Urbanic
National Auto Dealers Association Chairman Tom Castriota
Transportation Sec Sean Duffy
Deputy transportation Sec Steven Bradbury
1/2

— Helen Kennedy (@helenkennedy.bsky.social) December 3, 2025 at 6:33 PM

WV Sen Shelly Moore Capito
ND Sen Kevin Cramer
Missouri Sen Eric Schmidt
Fla Rep. Vern Buchanan
Tenn Sen Marsha Blackburn
Texas Sen Ted Cruz
Ohio Sen Bernie Moreno
Missouri Rep Sam Graves
Pa Rep Mike Kelly
Texas Rep Roger Williams
Ohio Rep Troy Bolderson
Michigan Rep. Lisa McClain
2/2

— Helen Kennedy (@helenkennedy.bsky.social) December 3, 2025 at 6:33 PM

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.