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President Trump has made no secret of how much he hates the Somali people. But even for him, his latest tirade plumbs new depths of ugliness.
Make no mistake: his post from last Thursday is actively calling on white Minnesotans to engage in a race war, to attack their neighbors, to succumb to the xenophobic violence that is at the heart of the Trump regime.
But make no mistake about this either: Minnesotans aren’t going to take the bait.
That’s not just some puffery about how great or noble Minnesotans are. The state does indeed struggle with racism, with one of the largest education achievement gaps in the country, outrageous disparities in housing, and police disproportionately targeting Black people. But Trump already tried to get white Minnesotans to turn on the immigrant communities in the state, and he failed miserably.
Trump has, of course, attacked the Somali population for years. He’s been going after Rep. Ilhan Omar since at least 2019, gleefully ginning up death threats against her.
Last December, he ranted to reporters about how hundreds of thousands of Somali immigrants were “completely taking over the once great state of Minnesota.” And, of course, his hatred for Somali people formed the basis for the alleged fraud that became the justification for Metro Surge.
But what Trump is doing now is next level. He’s not just attacking Somali residents. Rather, he’s calling for Minnesotans to attack them as well. And of course, it’s all based on absolute lies.
Let’s unpack Trump’s disgusting Truth Social post to see how little truth is in there.
Has the state been “taken over by Somali immigrants”? The state has about 5.8 million residents, 80 percent of whom are white. Roughly 102,000 Somalis live in the state, with about 83,000 in the Twin Cities metro area. That’s under 2 percent of the population.
Even if one joins Trump’s weird racist fantasy that all Somalis are acting in concert to attack white Minnesotans, the numbers to back up his insanity just aren’t there.
How about the allegation that there is “Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State”?
Unlike the federal government, which seems to no longer bother to keep accurate data on much of anything, Minnesota’s state government meticulously tracks criminal data. From 2024 to 2025, the state’s violent crime rate dropped 13 percent, and the state’s property crime rate dropped 12 percent. And this isn’t just a blip, a downturn in a sea of increases.
Aside from relatively small upticks during 2020 and 2021, the crime rate has been on a downward trajectory for years. If you compare the total crimes in 2018 to the total crimes in 2025, you’ve got a drop of roughly 22 percent.
Minnesota’s murder rate is at its lowest in years. The state has a lower violent crime rate than Trump’s current home state of Florida. It has a lower violent crime rate than Texas, the state conservatives constantly seem to aspire to be. In fact, it has a lower rate than every Southern state, and a lower rate than the surrounding states of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Iowa.
But what if we acknowledge what Trump is really saying here: that Somalis are disproportionately responsible for crime in the state. There’s no data to support that, because there is literally no data on it.
The state breaks out crime data by race, but not by national origin. Late last year, GOP Rep. Tom Emmer, who has joined Trump in trying to whip up a race war in his own state, declared that “80 percent of the crimes being committed in the Twin Cities Minnesota are being committed by Somalis.”
Come on, Tom.
Since 2021, about 37 percent of people arrested in the metro area are Black, so even if every last crime was committed by Somali immigrants and Somalis born in the state, you can’t get to 80 percent. And since there are about 316,000 Black residents in the metro area, with only about 83,000 of those being Somali, there’s no way that racist math is ever going to work.
But Trump and his fellow travelers are latching onto two recent incidents as proof, somehow, that crime is out of control.
The first is a spate of gun violence from what police describe as loosely organized Somali youth gangs. In a boon for racist Republicans, the violence has been concentrated in some of the wealthier suburbs. This isn’t something that should be glossed over, but this violence is by Somali youth against other Somali youth. There’s no coordinated attack on the Good White People of Minnesota as Trump and Emmer are dogwhistling about.
The other incident is something that the administration is widely touting as a major victory: stopping an alleged terror attack on the Mall of America by Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud, an 18-year-old Somali-American who was born in the United States. But the story of the terror plot looks a lot more like the FBI pushing a teenager for years to commit violence and then giving him the tools to do so. The agency started grooming Mohamud when he was 16 and, when he finally agreed to commit violence, sold him the gun with which to do it.
The FBI has been at this for well over a decade in Minnesota, investigating whether Somali youth have been “radicalized” since way back in 2008 and fueling a constant drumbeat of assertions that Somali residents have been poised to commit violence against Minnesotans. For years, they even used community outreach programs as ways to infiltrate groups and gather intelligence.
Trump is also trying to recycle his tired fraud accusations, with the nonsense idea this time around that somehow Gov. Tim Walz has personally profited from rampant wrongdoing by Somalis.
Unlike Trump himself, there’s no evidence whatsoever that Walz is profiting from his position. What there is evidence of, however, is that the Republican mania for outsourcing government duties to private companies while simultaneously slashing the number of state employees to oversee such things is the crack in the foundation that let this sort of fraud flourish.
But let’s pretend, for the sake of an ugly racist argument, that Somali residents really are engaged in comprehensive financial fraud against the Good White People of Minnesota. The solution for that is to investigate and prosecute people, not to demand that Minnesotans rise up and beg the federal government to come in and commit violence on their behalf.
But the administration doesn’t care about fraud, except as a cudgel. You can tell by how the Department of Justice has let the US Attorney’s Office in Minnesota become a shambolic shell of what it once was. Multiple top prosecutors, including the attorney who had spearheaded the Feeding Our Future trials, left the office after ICE murdered Renee Good, when it became clear that the DOJ wanted to go after Good’s widow instead of investigating the senseless murder. The office has since resorted to begging the court to let them delay a fraud trial because of “staffing changes.”
This is also, of course, Trump trying to put his thumb on the scale for the midterms.
Minnesota has been reliably blue for years. The last time the Republicans won a statewide race was 2006. The best chance the GOP has is to ride a wave of racist hatred all the way to the ballot box. Indeed, Minnesota Republicans are “sounding the alarm,” as Fox News breathlessly put it, about increasing crime in the state and how the only way to fix this is to pull the lever for the GOP in November.
And finally, this call for nakedly racist violence isn’t a one off. The administration is absolutely bloodthirsty for a race war on all fronts. It’s what is behind the bleak possibility of a livestreamed execution of Nidal Hasan, who, of course, happens to not be white. Vice President JD Vance really gave that racist game away when he called Hasan’s actions, which killed 13 people and wounded 32, “the worst terrorist attack on American soil outside of 9/11.”
Come on, JD.
Timothy McVeigh, when he bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995, killed 168 innocent people, 19 of them children, and wounded 500 others. His actions followed the pattern of a brutal act of violence found in The Turner Diaries, a deeply racist piece of propaganda that McVeigh loved so much he sent clippings of it to his sister days before the bombing.
But McVeigh, of course, was white, so apparently he gets a pass from Vance.
Minnesotans aren’t stupid
Residents of the North Star State are well aware that Trump’s post may mark the beginning of Metro Surge 2.0, another violent siege of the state by federal agents.
Trump and his ilk genuinely don’t understand the notion that white citizens would care for the immigrant communities in their midst, and they’re going to keep trying to drive a wedge between us. But Minnesotans will do what they did the first time around: take to the streets and protect our neighbors at any cost.
It seems a bit foolish, a bit cliché, to say that love will win out here, because it’s really tough to stand against the full force of the federal government. But what Metro Surge showed the world is that people do not want to watch their neighbors be brutalized, shot, and torn from their homes, and no amount of Trump posting on Truth Social is ever going to change that.
That’s it for now
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Thanks for reading.
Donald Trump here imitates the ultra orthodox regime in Israel where Netanyahu’s haredim allies urge settlers to violence in the West Bank.