A desperate Trump puts his racism on full display

Donald Trump needs to put the phone down at night and get some sleep. After spending three hours Monday night manically sharing more than 160 bizarre posts on Truth Social, he spent most of Tuesday’s televised cabinet meeting struggling to stay awake — and he lost the battle more than once. This was just the most recent example of his flagging energy and focus. But he woke right up when it came time for him to rant about immigrants. 

It’s hard to know if Trump is simply ratcheting up his deportation policy to distract from his low poll numbers and a foreign policy that seems increasingly beyond his comprehension, or if this escalation is a specific policy push by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. What’s clear is that the administration has entered a new phase in its plan to rid the nation of immigrants. 

What started out as a campaign promise to deport the “worst of the worse” gang members like MS-13 and Tren de Aragua has progressed to a full scale purge of any non-white, non-citizen. Trump is now even talking about “denaturalization” and “re-migration,” two terms that are right out of the Great Replacement Theory playbook. 

After the shooting of two National Guard soldiers on Nov. 26 in Washington, D.C., allegedly by an Afghan national who worked for a CIA-run counterterrorism team, Trump seized on the crime as an excuse to target Afghan refugees, particularly those who had come into the country following the American withdrawal in 2021.

At the time, many Republicans were highly critical of Joe Biden’s administration for not allowing more Afghans to emigrate and using the alleged failure as yet another cudgel with which to batter Biden for fulfilling the agreement that Trump had signed before he left office. The shooting by what appears to be a mentally ill refugee opened the door for more criticism of Biden and a pledge to send Afghan refugees back to where they came from.

This isn’t the first time Trump has targeted legal immigrants for removal. The administration has already withdrawn Temporary Protected Status from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Syria and Venezuela, and are in the process of deporting those who are already here under that program, although there is still litigation pending. There’s no reason for it.

Like so many of the immigrants who are being harassed and abducted on the streets by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, along with Customs and Border Patrol, every day, they have been working and contributing to our society. But Trump has arbitrarily decided they have to go. 

When speaking to reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Thanksgiving — the day after the shooting — he pivoted from his attacks on Afghan immigration to railing against Somalians as well. They are “ripping off our country,” he said, pledging “we’re not going to put up with these kind of assaults on law and order by people who shouldn’t even be in our country.” When a confused reporter asked what Somalians had to do with the Afghan suspect, the president blithely replied, “nothing, but Somalians have caused a lot of trouble,” and then insulted Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. He continued that theme in his crude, late-night Thanksgiving “message” on Truth Social that characterized Somalians in Minnesota as roving gangs “looking for prey as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone.”

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The president had apparently been exposed to an article by Christopher Rufo, one of the right’s most celebrated propagandists, who co-wrote an hysterical article claiming that Somalians had been committing welfare fraud and sending the proceeds to the terrorist group Al-Shabaab, which has not been confirmed. That’s exactly the kind of charge that makes Trump automatically reach for collective punishment. 

Unsurprisingly, in the aftermath of Trump’s comments, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has jumped on the most recent xenophobic bandwagon head first, calling for a “full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.” The country’s founders and forefathers, she said, “built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.” 

On Monday, the administration announced it had paused all immigration applications from 19 countries it has already restricted from travel to the U.S., and is now halting citizenship and green card processing for all of them. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the administration is halting all refugee admissions — except for white South Africans whom they have deemed to be the victims of racial discrimination. Trump also banned the country from the 2026 G20 summit due to its alleged oppression of white citizens.

Trump’s comments at the cabinet meeting on Tuesday put his racism and xenophobia on full, incontrovertible display. “We keep taking in garbage into our country,” he said. “Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage…when they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but b***h, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.” 

Vice President JD Vance pounded the table and the Cabinet burst into applause. Noem pledged to deploy ICE to Minnesota to root out the Somali- Americans she claims fraudulently obtained their citizenship. 

Imagine what it’s like to be a Somali-American today. Your president is calling you “garbage” on national television and his Cabinet applauds the sentiment. The government is sending masked thugs into your neighborhood to hunt you down. You thought this was your country and now you’re being told it isn’t. Imagine what it’s like to be any immigrant in America right now.