During the campaign for the November 3 US election, Trump pledged that his Republican colleagues would unseat Omar and her fellow Democrats, claiming their progressive politics had alienated voters.
“You know, one of the reasons we're gonna win Minnesota? Ilhan Omar,” Trump told a crowd in Pennsylvania on November 2.
“I’m gonna win Minnesota because of Ilhan Omar,” he said at an October 29 rally in Florida.
However, Trump’s Democratic rival, Joe Biden, won Minnesota handily on November 3 by 7 percentage points. What’s more, both Omar and Minnesota Democratic Senator Tina Smith won their reelection races.
“He effed around and found out, I guess,” Omar told Intercept journalist Ryan Grim on the November 6 episode of the Deconstructed podcast when asked her opinion about the election results.
The quip is now featured on a pair of T-shirts and stickers on Omar’s site, one in gold and one in blue, but in a slightly more explicit form that stars out some of the letters.
The store features T-shirts, sweatshirts and stickers with other slogans as well, including “organized people beat organized money” and “women of color refused to be muzzled.”
Omar belongs to an informal bloc of Democratic women of color in the US House of Representatives who swept into office in the 2018 elections called “the Squad.” While each of them has aroused conservative anger and even jostled their more centrist Democratic colleagues with their outspoken progressive politics, Omar has attracted unique vitriol from Trump because she is a Somali immigrant and a Muslim who wears a hijab. The only other Muslim in Congress, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), is also part of the Squad.
Since before he became president in 2017, Trump has attacked both immigrants and Muslims, claiming they form a criminal element in the United States and are hostile to American values and warning that Democrats will enable such problems to continue. After he took office, he quickly moved to ban immigration from a slew of majority-Muslim countries and vastly expanded efforts to hunt down, prosecute and deport undocumented immigrants, especially from the Caribbean and Latin America.
“In 2016 I almost won Minnesota. In 2020, because of America hating anti-Semite Rep. Omar, & the fact that Minnesota is having its best economic year ever, I will win the State! ‘We are going to be a nightmare to the President,’ she say. No, AOC Plus 3 are a Nightmare for America!” Trump tweeted in 2019, referring to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), another Squad member. The fourth member of the Squad is Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA). All of them won their reelection campaigns in 2020.
Trump, however, has likely been unseated himself. Although he has contested the ballot count in several US states where the race was close between him and Biden, recounts have only seen state officials re-certify their earlier reports that Biden had won, and his lawsuits alleging voter fraud have been thrown out one by one. Most of the mainstream media have declared Biden the winner, and the presumed president-elect has moved ahead with building his transition team for a January 2021 assumption of office, but the decision is not official until either Trump concedes or the Electoral College casts its votes, the latter of which will happen next week.