Donald Trump and Racist Tropes about Somalia

Amid the ongoing fallout of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, U.S. President Donald Trump has blasted not just Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, but also the entire country of Somalia.

For background, Ilhan Omar has given various interviews about Kirk since his death, including an interview with Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan that evoked tremendous right-wing outrage. On September 17, the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly voted down a resolution to censure Omar.

Trump then weighed in himself:

Trump made similar remarks to reporters:

"How are they doing? How's their government? Do they have a president? Do they have a council? Do they have anything? Do they have police? I love these people that come from a place with nothing. Nothing, no anything. And then they tell us how to run our country," The president told reporters aboard Air Force One. "I think if she got censured, that's great. If she got impeached, that's even better."

I think there is clear racism here, on two levels.

Notably, Mehdi Hasan only focused on one level in his comments on Trump’s post, writing, “‘Ilhan Omar’s Country of Somalia’ is an inherently racist statement. Her country is the United States. Omar is a US citizen.”

Hasan here practically cedes the point to Trump about Somalia itself. “She’s from here, not Chaos-land!” he seems to say.

I suspect that Hasan’s lack of pushback against Trump’s framing of Somalia is because “Somalia” appears more in the U.S. as a symbol of chaos than it does as an actual place that one could study or think about in a deep way.

There are five points I can think of that challenge Trump’s depiction of Somalia (well, six, but the sixth is problematic and we’ll go there afterwards):

1. Good things happen in Somalia - ask the camel herders. No one, including me, should play down the levels of violence and poverty there - but to call Somalia “a place with nothing” is to defecate on all the people who live there and all the many people working, striving, for a better Somalia: the poets, the filmmakers and actors, the novelists, the journalists (many of whom have encountered death, imprisonment, and harassment in their work), and the many civil servants, ordinary people and, yes, police who may never receive a news writeup (and some of whom do!) but who have made contributions to their country and their communities. Without being saccharine about it, one can find plenty of inspiration in the creativity, bravery, and tenacity that many Somalis - most of whom were now born after the civil war began - have displayed even amid the most unfavorable circumstances.

2. Trump clearly doesn’t care about contradictions, but the contradictions are brazen: his own senior appointees, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Hegseth, have alluded to and even seemed to praise US-Somali cooperation on counterterrorism. Hegseth in February: “At President Trump's direction and in coordination with the Federal Government of Somalia, we authorized U.S. Africa Command to conduct coordinated airstrikes today targeting ISIS-Somalia operatives in the Golis mountains.” Rubio in July: “The United States looks forward to strengthening our shared bonds as we work together on economic growth and combatting extremism.” The new commander of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), General Davgin Anderson, met with Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud in Mogadishu earlier this very month. From U.S. Embassy Mogadishu: “General Anderson stressed the critical need for all partners to start working more closely together and focus on the shared goal of ridding Somalia of terrorism once and for all, in partnership with President Mohamud.” Now, I’m not going to take some pro-War on Terror line and say that Trump’s remarks “weaken the fight against ISIS” or whatever, but I do think his acerbic comments on Somalia in the context of U.S. politics cannot be reconciled with the diplomatic language of counterterrorism “partnership” and “coordination.” The point is that Trump knows very well, or should know, that Somalia indeed has a president, one who is considered (for better or worse) a U.S. ally.

3. Another layer of tension in Trump’s comments is that he himself treats the U.S. government as a vehicle for his own personal and familial empowerment and enrichment. He is, even in the words of a senior fellow at a leading conservative think tank, the “Quid Pro Quo President.” So when Trump decries Somali corruption and seems to laud the supposedly great and powerful U.S. government, it rings hollow - not because the U.S. is as bad off as Somalia, but because Trump takes having a functioning government for granted. It’s as though someone inherited an ancestral estate and, while selling off the furniture and stripping out the copper wiring and letting the weeds grow, pauses to mock the homeless.

4. Somalia has indeed been through tremendous suffering and upheaval since the fall of President Siad Barre in 1991; indeed, the country was on a downward trajectory even from its loss in the 1977-1978 Ogaden War onwards. Behind Somalia’s troubles are many factors. Somalis themselves are often quick to highlight the thorny challenge of clan/qabiil and tribalism/qabyaalad - but there are many other factors that help explain why Somalia followed the trajectory it did. Among those factors, in rough chronological order, are (a) the lingering effects of colonialism, (b) Somalia being treated like a plaything by the Cold War superpowers, and (c) the numerous destructive interventions in post-1991 Somalia by neighboring countries such as Ethiopia and Kenya - interventions that were often backed by other, even more powerful states. The United States has ranked at the forefront of outside powers attempting to intervene in and manipulate Somalia, with exhibit A being the various attempts to subvert a nascent government called the Islamic Courts Union in the mid-2000s, attempts that contributed significantly to the rise of al-Shabab. All of these vicious cycles and outside interventions have contributed to reinforcing qabyaalad, leaving clan as one of the few institutions that people trust - but then qabyaalad makes it harder to build a government that commands wide and deep national respect. Successive Somali governments have been caught between outside influences and internal fragmentation.

5. What is Trump ultimately saying, here? What is the argument? He doesn’t quite spell it out, because the implications are so nasty. Who, for example, is the “scum” in question? He talks about Omar in one breath, but then all Somalis in the next - his remarks at Air Force One were all “they,” “their,” “these people”…his comments on social media and to reporters leave little doubt that he is saying there is something fundamentally wrong with Somalis, period. As though if one transported some other group of people to Somalia and gave them the same history of the last hundred years, that this other group would somehow have fared better…this is the essence of racism, the insinuation that an entire people is defective.

The other way to push back against Trump’s comments would be the classic DC maneuver of saying, “Actually, sir, Somalia is bad but Somaliland is good.” Indeed, many in Trump’s orbit - the Republican Africa hand J. Peter Pham, the Republican Congressman Chris Smith, and others - have pushed for recognizing Somaliland and diplomatically freezing out Somalia. (Pham gleefully piled on to Trump’s social media post on Omar and, in a telling choice of terms, derided Somalia’s supposed “insolence” - note that “insolence” can only come from someone the speaker views as inferior.)

But I don’t think extolling Somaliland while bashing Somalia is a way to bypass the racism at the core of Trump’s remarks - it would just mean applying that racism to a smaller group of people. (Not to mention that recognizing Somaliland would create tremendous diplomatic upheaval, which is a key reason why it hasn’t happened yet, even with Trump at the helm.)

I’ll close by quoting the opening paragraph from Safia Aidid’s “How to Write about Somalia,” which perfectly anticipates Trump’s rants:

Always use the words ‘crisis,’ ‘instability,’ ‘conflict,’ ‘anarchy,’ or ‘terror’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘refugee,’ ‘militant,’ ‘warlord,’ ‘failure,’ ‘collapse,’ ‘clan,’ ‘radical,’ ‘terrorist,’ ‘extremist,’ or ‘pirate.’ Also useful are words such as ’nomadic,’ ‘pastoral,’ and ‘tribal,’ as well as made-up verbs combined with these other words, like the ‘Somalization of the crisis.’

And from near the end:

Disregard context and wonder whether the Somali adventure in politics was always destined to end in statelessness with these tribal nomads at the helm.