Trump’s "Garbage" Politics Has a Name

Trump’s dehumanizing attack on Somalis is a warning about who this country is willing to cast out of “We the People.”

President Trump showing reporters a sheet of paper with a photo of Representative Ilhan Omar. (Credit: The New York Times) 

Earlier this week, the president of the United States sat at the head of a Cabinet table and called people like me–Somali Americans, a small, visible, overwhelmingly lawful community living in places like Minneapolis, Columbus, Seattle, and even Fargo–“garbage.”

Our country, he said, “stinks.” We “contribute nothing.” We “do nothing but complain.” When he finished, his vice president, J.D. Vance, banged the table in encouragement.

When a president looks into the cameras and calls an entire community of citizens “garbage,” the question is no longer whether he means it. Of course he does. The question is whether everyone else–courts, universities, city councils, business leaders, voters–is prepared to live with it.

For years, Americans have argued about whether this kind of rhetoric is just Trump being Trump or something darker. At a certain point, the argument becomes an evasion. A president who divides the country into “real” Americans and internal enemies; who treats loyalty to himself as more important than the law; who turns public contempt for a targeted group into a recurring spectacle–that is no mystery. We have a word for that style of politics: fascism.

By fascism, I mean a politics organized around the boundary between “the people” and their enemies, in which legal constraints vanish when they stand in the way, and in which public cruelty toward the despised becomes a kind of founding ritual. That is what we are watching.

The “garbage” remark fits the pattern perfectly. It draws a bright line between the “we” the president claims to represent and the “they” he blames for the country’s problems. It casts a set of citizens as pollutants, not neighbors. It tells his audience that the real issue is not prices or wages or housing, but the presence of people whose mere existence on American soil is an affront.

This picture bears no resemblance to the actual Somali presence in the United States. Most of us are not recent border crossers. We came as refugees, as children, as family reunification cases. Over time, we did what this country says it wants immigrants to do. We became permanent residents and citizens, with some of the highest naturalization rates of any refugee group. Our names are on voter rolls, property records, and business licenses. Our labor shows up in warehouses and factories, in nursing homes and hospitals, in taxis and trucking routes. We pay state and federal taxes that help fund the very Cabinet agencies now being repurposed to target our neighborhoods.

If this story sounds familiar, it should. Every large immigrant wave in American history has heard some version of “you do not belong.” Irish Catholics were depicted as papist infiltrators in 19th‑century cartoons. German immigrants were labeled “enemy aliens” during World War I; thousands were forced to register, lost their jobs, or were interned and had property seized. Japanese Americans, two‑thirds of them citizens, were locked in camps during World War II under Executive Order 9066, while wartime posters and editorials rendered them as vermin and saboteurs to be trapped and contained. Each time, the country later admitted it had gone too far.

Those episodes unfolded under different ideologies–some fascist, some not–but they all followed the same script: pick an internal minority, convince the majority that it is a threat, loosen the usual rules in the name of safety, and count on respectable people to tell themselves it is temporary and not really their concern.

What is different now is that none of this can be written off as ignorance. The history is in our textbooks. The photographs of the camps and registration centers are in our museums. We know how dehumanizing language has been used before, and who paid the price. And still, with that knowledge, we are watching a president talk about a Black Muslim community in language that comes straight out of that playbook.

For Somalis, the message is unmistakable. It does not matter whether you are a citizen, a green‑card holder, a DACA recipient, or a refugee whose paperwork has been scrutinized for years. When the president calls your community "garbage," he is telling you that your rights are contingent–that your safety depends not on the Constitution, but on his mood and the calculations of people around him.

You can see that in what is happening beneath the rhetoric. In the weeks prior to the "garbage" remark, the administration moved to end Temporary Protected Status for Somali nationals, pushed the refugee‑admissions ceiling toward its lowest levels in modern history, and revived a nineteen‑country travel ban that includes Somalia. In Minnesota, home to one of the largest Somali communities in the country,roughly a hundred agents have been sent into the Twin Cities for an immigration operation aimed at Somali neighborhoods. Unmarked vehicles idle near Somali malls. Business owners report that customers are staying home. Parents keep their children inside—not because of crime, but because they do not know when a sweep will come down their block. When a president calls a group "garbage," it changes how people with badges and guns think about who it is permissible to frighten, and what level of aggression the public will tolerate.

Why Somalis? Partly because we are numerically small and visually obvious. Our clothing, our accents, our mosques make us easy to single out. Our communities are concentrated in a handful of states that have already become symbols in the country's culture wars. For a president who has not delivered on basic economic promises, there is a certain convenience in pointing at a Black Muslim community in Minnesota and saying: that is the problem.

That, too, is a well‑worn move. When wages stagnate and costs rise, it is easier to blame immigrants for fraud than to explain why prices are still high. It is easier to mock hijabs than to discuss why health care remains unaffordable. It is easier to rage about a Somali mall than to admit that tariffs and chaotic governance are hurting farmers and small businesses.

Somalis will endure this moment. Many of our elders survived state collapse, warlords, civil war in Somalia, famine, and years in refugee camps. They did not cross deserts and oceans just to be undone by one man's insults at a Cabinet table. They will keep working, praying, opening businesses, and raising children. They will keep sending money home through fragile remittance channels to keep relatives alive in a country still struggling with violence and drought. They are not going anywhere.

The more interesting question is what everyone else will do.

Fascism does not succeed because one man talks like a fascist. It succeeds when enough people decide that talk like that is the acceptable price of doing business. It succeeds when universities decide that issuing a statement will only inflame donors, when city councils decide that immigration raids are someone else’s jurisdiction, when corporate leaders decide that criticizing a president who calls citizens "garbage" is not worth the risk to share price. It succeeds when neighbors who know better stay quiet at work so as not to start an argument.

There is nothing especially complicated about the moral test here. You do not need a degree in political science to know that calling an entire community "garbage" is wrong. You do not need to share Ilhan Omar’s politics, or mine, or support any particular immigration bill, to insist that dignified treatment in this country should not be conditional on how one is portrayed in a president’s outbursts.

If the United States is serious about the story it tells itself–that people can come from anywhere and become American–then that principle has to hold when it is hardest to defend: when the people in question are Black, Muslim, visibly foreign, and politically unpopular. Either the promise covers us, too, or it was never a promise at all.

Trump’s words this week were disgusting. More importantly, they were clarifying. They tell us exactly how he understands power: not as a responsibility to protect all citizens, but as the right to decide which citizens are worth protecting at all.

That is a fascist instinct. We can name it. We can refuse to normalize it. Or we can get used to it.

Somalis are already doing our part: studying, working, voting, paying taxes, taking care of our families here and abroad. The burden now shifts to everyone who claims to care about democracy, pluralism, and the rule of law. You do not have to like us to say that we are not garbage. You only have to insist that in this country, no president gets to decide which human beings are disposable.

That is the test in front of us. It is as large as our future as a republic.