There are moments in history when language itself becomes a warning. This week, that warning came directly from the mouth of the President of the United States.
Standing before a crowd during a public address, President Donald Trump targeted Somali immigrants and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar with a barrage of racialized insults, conspiracy theories, and calls for expulsion. “We ought to get her the hell out,” Trump said of Omar. As the audience erupted into chants of “Send her back,” the President did not stop it. He let it live.
That distinction matters. This was not a slip of the tongue. This was not a private rant. This was the voice of the presidency signaling who belongs, and who does not.
Trump did not limit his attack to Omar’s politics. He mocked her identity and her faith. Referring to her hijab in crude, demeaning language, he reduced a visible symbol of her religion to a punchline—inviting laughter at the very thing that marks her as Muslim in a country where anti-Muslim violence remains a daily threat.
This was not humor. This was religious humiliation as political theater. And it came from the highest office in the nation.
Similar to what his Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller, did during Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, Trump mocked, and sought to dehumanize an entire nation and its people in one sweeping stroke.
“They have no military. They have no nothing. They have no Parliament,” he said of Somalia. “They have no police. They police themselves; they kill each other all the time.”
None of this is true. Somalia does have a government, a military, a police force, and a parliament. But truth has never been the point of this kind of rhetoric. The purpose is humiliation. The purpose is to mark a people as primitive, lawless, and disposable.
That language has a long American history.
During Jim Crow, Black communities were routinely described by politicians as criminal, uncivilized, and incapable of self-governance. Those lies were not just hateful, they were strategic. They justified segregation, voter suppression, mass incarceration, and racial terror. Public humiliation wasn’t a byproduct of policy; it was its foundation.
And nowhere was that strategy more devastating than in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Before the 1921 massacre, white city leaders and newspapers painted Greenwood—the most prosperous Black community in America—as inherently dangerous and morally corrupt. They framed its residents as lawless, predatory, and unworthy of citizenship. That narrative made it easier for officials to look away and for mobs to justify destroying 35 square blocks of Black wealth, killing hundreds of Black people, and displacing thousands.
The blueprint was unmistakable:
Dehumanize first.
Exclude second.
Enforce later—through violence, law, or both.
Trump’s words follow that same blueprint today. His rhetoric toward Somali immigrants and Rep. Ilhan Omar echoes the very strategies used to justify Greenwood’s destruction: assign criminality, deny humanity, mock culture and identity, and then claim the community itself is the threat that must be contained.
What we are seeing is not the past returning; it is the past being activated.
The President did not stop at attacking a country. He repeated one of the most dangerous and thoroughly debunked lies about Rep. Ilhan Omar. “She married her brother to get in, right?” Trump said. “She married her brother… therefore she’s here illegally.”
This claim has been investigated repeatedly and found to be false. Rep. Omar is a naturalized U.S. citizen and a duly elected member of Congress. Yet Trump went further, declaring, We ought to get her the hell out…She does nothing but complain,” he said — as if dissent were a crime and not a constitutional right.
That is not political critique. That is a deportation threat issued by a sitting president against a sitting lawmaker.
Authoritarian leaders do not begin with tanks. They begin with narratives. They attack the press. They ridicule political opponents. They turn ethnic minorities into national villains. They cast themselves as the sole protector of the “real” nation.
Trump’s remarks follow this exact script. He framed Somali immigrants as criminals dumped into the U.S. from prisons. He publicly mocked a Black Muslim woman’s faith. He suggested entire communities should be investigated. He questioned a congresswoman’s legal right to exist in public life.
Democracies do not exile elected officials for dissent. That is the logic of regimes that consolidate power by purging those they believe are enemies.
The danger here is not only the insult. The danger is what the insult authorizes.
The presidency is not just a microphone; it is control over immigration systems, federal agencies, surveillance power, and enforcement. When rhetoric like this comes from the highest office in the land, it creates a climate where harassment feels justified, investigations feel inevitable, and violence feels permitted.
Words from the presidency move machinery.
And this is the warning that must be heard clearly by Black America and every person of color in this country:
If a sitting president can publicly dehumanize a Black Muslim community today, he can legally target another Black community tomorrow. The targets may shift. The language may change. The excuses will evolve. But the mechanism remains the same—strip people of dignity first, then question their right to belong, then move power against them.
Black Americans know this pattern. We have lived it. We carry it in our laws, our cemeteries, our economic gaps, and our generational trauma.
Somali Americans are Black. They are Muslim. They are immigrants. They sit at the exact intersection where America’s oldest hatreds converge. What is being tested on them now is not just policy; it is permission.
We often ask how past societies failed to see what was unfolding before their eyes. We forget that decline rarely announces itself with sirens. It arrives through normalization. Through laughter at cruelty. Through silence after danger is named.
This moment is not about whether Trump’s words were offensive. That question is settled. The question now is whether we still recognize the sound of democracy slipping, or whether we have grown too used to the noise to hear the warning anymore.