Trump is fixated on Ilhan Omar. She embodies the America he fears most

Donald Trump has never been a man of delicacy. Subtlety is not a tool in his arsenal, nor is restraint.

Yet even by his own theatrical standards, when the US president described a sitting American congresswoman as "garbage" during a White House cabinet meeting earlier this week - extending the insult to the communities she represents - it marked a new descent into political depravity.

In that single moment, Trump violated not only the norms of public discourse but the very principles of pluralism and equality embedded in the American Constitution. The presidency, once draped - however imperfectly - in the language of dignity, was reduced to a megaphone for spite.

His target, as so often, was Ilhan Omar: a brilliant, self-assured Somali, Black Muslim woman who has come to embody everything Trump cannot tolerate: Islam, Africa, immigration, and intelligent women who refuse to shrink in his presence.

What began as a routine attack on a Democratic opponent quickly metastasised into a verbal assault on an entire segment of American society. "Ilhan Omar is garbage, her friends are garbage... we don't want them in our country," he declared, as though issuing an eviction notice rather than addressing an elected representative. 

Over the years, Omar has become the symbolic focal point of Trump's grievance politics. He invokes her name with obsessive regularity, often unprovoked, as if she were a personal adversary haunting his political imagination.

In her, he condenses everything he fears and despises: the hijab, Africa, migration, Muslimness, womanhood, autonomy. Each insult is engineered not merely to wound her, but to discipline anyone who resembles her.

In Ilhan Omar, Trump condenses everything he fears and despises: the hijab, Africa, migration, Muslimness, womanhood, autonomy

But the pattern extends far beyond Ilhan Omar.

Trump's rhetoric has grown more virulent as his political failures deepen and his moral hollowness is further exposed.

He berates journalists, sneers at foreign accents, demonises migrants, and traduces Muslims, Africans, and Latinos with ritualistic regularity.

This is not impulsiveness; it is method. It is a political theology founded on the degradation of the Other.

What sets Trump apart is not the originality of his racism, but its brazenness. The old codes - the dog-whistles, the plausible deniability, the shame - have been discarded.

What was once whispered is now chanted. What once crept along the fringe now struts at the centre of power.

Trump's toxic politics

The consequences of Trump's unleashed bigotry are immediate and grotesque.

A Republican congressional candidate in Texas made an unhinged announcement that she was running to "kick every dirty Muslim out of Texas", collapsing millions of American citizens into a single slur in one breath.

When challenged by talk show host Piers Morgan during a live broadcast, she doubled down, offering a flurry of ignorance, arrogance, and naked hatred as a political credential. This is the Trumpian ecosystem in full bloom: loud, illiterate, unashamed.

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These figures do not merely accompany Trump; they are his reflection.

The spectacle would verge on dark humour if it were not so dangerous: a migrant herself now campaigning as an immigration inquisitor, pulling the ladder up behind her with performative fervour.

There is something almost parodic about a party that drapes itself in the Stars and Stripes while outsourcing its moral voice to candidates who sound as though they have crawled out of an internet sewer.

That the Republican Party allows her to stand in the 31st congressional race is not merely a political misjudgment; it is ideological self-exposure.

Trump and his evangelical entourage are not creating new hatreds; they are laundering old ones. The language now hurled at Muslims mirrors almost perfectly the rhetoric once used to strip Black people and other people of colour of their humanity.

The target changes; the machinery does not.

To insist that Islamophobia is a critique of belief rather than of people is a sleight of hand bordering on farce.

In the American context, Muslims are overwhelmingly Black, brown, and Asian - precisely those populations long marked for racial subordination. Hatred of Islam here is not theological; it is racial, draped in religious costume.

A racialised project

After 9/11, the vocabulary of "extremism" and "radicalism" became elastic enough to ensnare entire communities under the guise of security.

But even that pretext has now crumbled. With Trump, subtlety died publicly. Islam became explicitly "dangerous" and Muslims "evil". Distinction vanished. Evidence became irrelevant. Nuance was declared unpatriotic.

What Trump cannot tolerate - and most likely cannot comprehend - is that in an age of demographic transformation and global interdependence, Islam is no longer positioned at the margins of American life. It is woven into its cities, institutions, labour and culture.

Muslims are no longer visitors to the American story; they are among its authors.

And yet Trump's hatreds are exquisitely selective. His fury towards Muslims, Africans and migrants dissolves instantly when confronted with oil, arms, and obscene wealth.

Trump hates Muslims, but loves their money. The same man who sneers at Muslim refugees beams with admiration before Muslim monarchs. He boasts of returning from the Gulf - Islam's birthplace - laden with "$4 trillion" in deals, a figure as inflated as his ego.

He speaks of autocrats with a tenderness he has never once extended to the urban poor or displaced migrants. It is as though his moral compass is calibrated exclusively in petro-dollars.

This is the moral arithmetic of Trumpism: contempt for the weak, reverence for the powerful. If you are poor, brown, Muslim and displaced, you are surplus. If you are rich, corrupt and useful, you are "tremendous".

Trump confuses power with virtue and vulnerability with worthlessness. He lashes downward with relish and genuflects upward without shame. This is not realism; it is moral squalor elevated to governing philosophy.

Two Americas collide

Trumpism, at its core, is not an aberration but a resurrection: the reanimation of America's racist colonial creed in contemporary costume.

The real struggle is not a personal duel between Trump and Omar, but a collision between two irreconcilable Americas

The US has always been split between two irreconcilable impulses: one that gestures towards liberty, constitutionalism, and human equality, and another built on extermination, enslavement, and racial hierarchy.

Trump does not waver between these Americas. He chooses and aligns openly with the tradition of domination and wraps it in the flag.

This inheritance is not dead. It persists in memory, in institutional reflexes, in the political subconscious - particularly among segments of white evangelical America for whom demographic change reads as an existential threat.

Trump did not summon this spectre from nothing; he merely gave it a stage, a microphone, and a movement.

And yet the final irony remains unavoidable: the America Trump seeks to repel is already here. It is multiracial, multi-faith, irreversibly plural. It speaks many languages. It wears many faces. It worships in many ways. It votes. It writes laws. It teaches children. It builds cities. It does not ask permission to exist.

Ilhan Omar incarnates that irreversibility.

That is precisely why Trump and his ideological ilk pursue her with such venom. She is not merely a political opponent; she is a convergence of everything this administration longs to erase from view: Muslim, African, immigrant, woman, articulate, elected.

In her presence, all of Trump's anxieties acquire a face. She is the future walking openly through the present.

The real struggle, then, is not a personal duel between Trump and Omar, but a collision between two irreconcilable Americas: one embalmed in a mythologised, racialised past and another pushing forward, imperfect, plural, and unstoppable.

What hangs in the balance is not merely a political contest but whether the United States will continue to kneel before the resentments Trump parades as politics, or finally confront and accept the country it has already become.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.