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9 hours ago
“That’s Teddy,” said Tim Mynett, husband of the US representative Ilhan Omar, as their five-year-old labrador retriever capered around her office on Capitol Hill. “If you make too much eye contact, he’ll lose it. He’s my best friend – and he’s our security detail these days.”
The couple were sitting on black leather furniture around a coffee table. Apart from a sneezing fit that took her husband by surprise, Omar had an unusual Zen-like calm for someone who receives frequent death threats and is the subject of a vendetta from the most powerful man in the world.
Speaking at a rally-style event in Pennsylvania last week, Donald Trump mocked her hijab and alleged that the Somali-born Omar married her own brother to gain US citizenship. “Therefore she’s here illegally,” he said. “She should get the hell out. Throw her the hell out! She does nothing but complain.”
The president’s supporters broke into a gleeful chant of: “Send her back! Send her back!”
What did Omar herself make of the comments? “They’re vile and it is, I believe, a really unhealthy and creepy obsession that he has with me,” the 43-year-old, wearing a green, white and pink banded sweater, told the Guardian on Friday as Teddy frolicked nearby. “Everybody knows I came to the United States at the age of 12 on a refugee status and became a citizen when I was 17 and obviously I’m a duly elected member of Congress and so my status is not in question in any kind of way.”
Trump was supposed to be talking about the cost of living in Pennsylvania on Tuesday but soon defaulted to boilerplate xenophobia. The Minnesota Democrat added: “He likes to deflect when things aren’t going well for him and there is a clear failure so far in his presidency. He hasn’t been able to address the affordability issues that the American people are still feeling … Cue the bigotry. It’s the same playbook and he just goes back to it; he doesn’t know anything else.”
The walls of Omar’s office were adorned with African-themed art: a stylised depiction of a woman wearing a head wrap painted with swirls of blue, red, yellow and orange; a square canvas entitled Djibouti depicting a tall wooden drum, a mortar and pestle and a woven basket. There was also a Jet magazine picture of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, and an Essence magazine profile of Omar and others members of the progressive “squad”.
Born in Somalia, Omar and her family fled the country’s civil war when she was eight. The family spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya before coming to the US in the 1990s. In 1997, she moved to Minneapolis with her family, and in 2000 she became a US citizen. Trump’s malign fixation with her goes back years. In 2019 he tweeted that Omar and the other members of the squad should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came”.
He has also repeatedly pushed the allegation that she married her brother, a rumour that started in 2016 when she ran for election to the state house of representatives in Minnesota. She described it as “absolutely false and ridiculous” and released a timeline of her marital and divorce history. The claim has persisted in rightwing media but no proof has emerged to substantiate it.
She draws comparisons with other conspiracy theories from the rightwing fever swamps. “This was a story that was put in a blog that shouldn’t have had any normal-thinking person looking into it,” Omar said. “But there is, I believe, this sort of severe desire on the right to find extreme ways to other people that they don’t think should be humanised.
“They’ve always had these fascinating accusations of trying to prove a negative so that this story continues to exist. We had the ‘birther’ story when [Barack] Obama was clearly born here and even when birth certificates were made available. There’s the Hillary Clinton keeping babies at a basement in a facility that doesn’t even have a basement. This is their way of trying to make me sound like something I’m not.”
Omar married Mynett, a political consultant, in 2020 on the day the US went into pandemic lockdown. He is sadly unsurprised by Trump’s latest verbal abuse. Wearing a beard and grey jersey, the 44-year-old commented: “This isn’t our first rodeo. During Trump’s first term he demonised my wife to the point where the United States government demanded that we have a full six-person security detail.
“They identified a plot to attack her and frankly it was a very patriotic moment for me to learn that there are white men on racist message boards online posing as racists themselves to suss out truly evil people and then go out and protect my wife, an immigrant member of Congress.”
He added: “That is to me one of the essences of what America is. Yeah, sure, it’s nothing new, but it’s upsetting to see that this is where the leader of our country wants to draw the national attention. It is just shocking and very upsetting.”
Security is now a paramount concern for every politician. In 2024, the US Capitol police investigated 9,474 concerning statements and direct threats against members of Congress, including their families and staff, more than double the 2017 total of 3,939. Reminders of the US’s surging culture of political violence are everywhere. In the corridors outside Omar’s office on Capitol Hill, some of her Republican colleagues have erected tributes to Charlie Kirk, the rightwing youth activist assassinated in September.
Omar’s friend Melissa Hortman, the former Minnesota house speaker, and her husband were shot dead at their home in June by a man disguised as a member of law enforcement. “In many ways you think, where can you be safe?” she said. “When you have the president using dehumanising language every single day, we know that message gets to the worst humans possible in this country and that they then take action.
“We’ve had people incarcerated for threatening to kill me. 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.”
Omar recalled that, when in 2019 she became the first woman of colour to represent Minnesota, and one of the first two Muslim American women elected to the House of Representatives, Trump’s attacks led to her having the highest level of death threats of any member of Congress.
“Now, in the four years when [Joe] Biden was president, my death rates went to almost zero,” she said. “Now they are back up and so there is a clear correlation between his presidency and the political violence that we see and the political danger that a lot of members of Congress and electeds feel across the country.”
She is determined not to let Trump’s “deranged attacks” undermine her day job in Congress, taking votes and providing constituent services for the people who elected her. Her priorities this year have included trying to safeguard healthcare, climate regulations and democracy while fighting back against Trump’s draconian immigration policies.
That includes her home patch. Trump last week labelled Minnesota Somalis as “garbage” and said he did not want them in the US. He has linked his administration’s immigration crackdown against the Somali community to a series of fraud cases involving government programmes in which many defendants have roots in the east African country.
Omar said: “He is clearly scapegoating the Somali community. The folks who committed the fraud have been prosecuted, many have already been sentenced, and there’s more investigation and prosecutions to come. I don’t believe a majority of Americans agree just because one person who shares an ethnicity with you does something that you then be held accountable for their misdeeds.”
About 84,000 of the 260,000 Somalis in the US live in the Minneapolis-St Paul area. The overwhelming majority are American citizens. Almost 58% were born in the US and 87% of the foreign-born Somalis are naturalised citizens.
But in a year that has seen Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids strike terror into communities across the country, and masked agents snatch people off the streets, no one is safe. This week the homeland security department announced that its enforcement operations have resulted in more than 605,000 deportations since 20 January while 1.9 million “illegal aliens” have voluntarily self-deported.
Omar said of Minnesota: “We’re seeing people being slammed to the ground, handcuffed, detained for hours. We are seeing people being told that their documents are not real. We are seeing people being tear-gassed. We saw one that was run over on the road, all of it being captured on camera. But again what he wants and what he was hoping for was to find a community that was undocumented.
“We’ve been here over 30 years. Nearly 60% of Somalis in Minnesota are born in the United States and these are people who have been mobilising themselves and preparing for his presidency and understanding that we have dealt with authoritarianism, we have dealt with dictatorship, and so we are vigilant about what that looks like and the community is showing just how resilient it is.”
Trump also used his speech in Pennsylvania to describe Somalia as “the worst country in the world”, stating: “They have no military. They have no nothing. They have no parliament. They don’t know what the hell the word parliament means. They have nothing. They have no police. They police themselves. They kill each other all the time.”
After years of denials, the president also admitted that a report from his first term was true: he did indeed refer to African nations as “shithole countries” and yearned for “nice” immigrants from Norway, Sweden and Denmark (all of which have predominantly white populations) instead of “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime” Somalia.
When the rest of the world watches these performances, what can it be thinking? Omar replied: “I believe it denigrates our standing as Americans that we could elect somebody who presents not only as a national embarrassment but as an international embarrassment.
“There isn’t a train of thought that the president ever puts out that is dignified and I believe as Americans we want to see ourselves as dignified people and would like to be represented by a person who carries themselves with dignity. I just cannot believe that we have a president that not only denigrates Americans but also denigrates different parts of America on a national and international stage every single day.”
The international community has also watched the US’s drift towards authoritarianism with consternation and alarm. Democracy will survive, Omar insisted, “but in a very fragile way. 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. We must do more to create stronger guardrails to make sure that the independence of our institutions remains.”
For all his strongman posturing, opinion polls show that Trump is now deeply unpopular, especially for failing to keep his promise to fix American’s affordability crisis. Republicans suffered a wipeout in last month’s elections in New Jersey, Virginia and New York, where democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani stormed to victory in the mayoral race.
Omar believes that Democrats can learn from Mamdani as they approach next year’s midterm elections for Congress. She said: “The biggest lesson from that election is how desperately the American electorate needs their candidates to be authentic, to be themselves and to talk about what really has impact on their lives.
“His focus on creating a more affordable New York, his focus on meeting people where they were at, his focus on not talking down at people but being in real conversation with them I think is what won him the election and what people need to do in order to be successful.”
Mynett added: “I’m no politician but I’d also add that young man’s fearlessness was incredibly contagious and inspiring and I think it’s another big piece of how he ended up where he did.”
Speaking of fearlessness, Mynett admires no one more than his wife. As he contemplated Omar’s courage under fire, he instinctively reached out and touched her arm. “The congresswoman’s always exhibiting grace under pressure,” he said. “For any human being in the universe to be targeted this way, I’ve never met one that could handle it better than my wife.
“A lot of times I think back to all of the trials and tribulations of her life – a child war refugee, there’s so much – but I don’t even think it’s that. I don’t think it’s her experience. I think it’s the core of who she is. She knows why she’s here and she’ll never be deterred by somebody doing racist, bigoted things towards her.”
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