7 Alarming Warnings: Omar Says Trump Fuels Violence

US congresswoman Ilhan Omar has warned that Donald Trump’s repeated personal attacks and dehumanising rhetoric are fuelling a climate of political violence that could have dangerous consequences.

Speaking days after the president called for her to be thrown out of the country, Omar said Trump’s incendiary language reaches “the worst humans possible” and encourages them to act.

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“We’ve had people incarcerated for threatening to kill me,” she told the Guardian in an interview at her Washington office. “We have people that are being prosecuted right now for threatening to kill me and so it is something that does stay in the back of our minds. But I also worry about those people finding someone who looks like me in Minneapolis or across the country and thinking it is me and harming them

Trump made the remarks at a rally-style event last week in Pennsylvania, where supporters chanted “Send her back!” after the president pushed a baseless conspiracy theory that Somali-born Omar married her own brother to become a US citizen. The Democrat, who arrived in the US as a refugee aged 12 and became a citizen at 17, described Trump’s fixation as “vile” and an “unhealthy and creepy obsession”.

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The Minnesota congresswoman said the attacks followed a familiar pattern. “When things aren’t going well for him … cue the bigotry,” she said, accusing Trump of deflecting from his failure to address cost-of-living pressures. “It’s the same playbook and he just goes back to it; he doesn’t know anything else.”

In a joint interview, Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett, said the threats were not new. During Trump’s first term, he recalled, the federal government required the couple to have a six-person security detail after identifying a plot against her. “This isn’t our first rodeo,” Mynett said. “But it’s upsetting to see that this is where the leader of our country wants to draw the national attention.”

US Capitol police investigated 9,474 concerning statements and direct threats against members of Congress in 2024, more than double the total in 2017. The rise comes amid a series of deadly attacks, including the killing of Minnesota state lawmaker Melissa Hartman and her husband earlier this year.

Omar said she has seen a direct correlation between Trump’s time in office and political violence. During Joe Biden’s presidency, she said, death threats against her “went to almost zero”, before rising again. In 2019, after Trump attacked her and other progressive Democrats known as “the Squad”, she received more death threats than any other member of Congress.
Trump has also escalated attacks on Somali Americans, recently describing them as “garbage” and Somalia as “the worst country in the world”. Omar accused him of scapegoating an entire community over isolated fraud cases, noting that most Somalis in Minnesota are US citizens and many were born in the country.
In a separate interview with the Minnesota news outlet WCCO, Omar said federal immigration agents pulled her son over as he travelled to a Target store. They let him go once he was “able to produce his passport ID”, Omar remarked.

“He always carries it with him,” Omar added.

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Despite that reality, Omar said to the Guardian that she would not be deterred from her work in Congress, which includes protecting healthcare, climate rules and democratic institutions, and would focus on affordability in next year’s midterm elections. But she warned that US democracy is fragile.

“His presidency has exposed some weaknesses that exist and it has certainly taught us that, while our institutions are strong, they are fragile to a dictatorship-like ruler,” she said. “We must do more to create stronger guardrails to make sure that the independence of our institutions remains.”