The Hunting of Ilhan Omar
"You can understand the Trump administration as, in its essence, a cargo cult devoted to the illiberal tradition in American politics.
At every turn, it seeks to instantiate a society where, as the historian Steven Hahn writes, “rights-bearing may be defined or limited by specific rulers or be based on communities of race, ethnicity, religion, and gender” and where “civil and political standing tend to be marked by social and cultural exclusions.” To this end, it uses power “in its most naked and aggressive forms,” including outright violence.
What makes this a cargo cult is the extent to which the administration is preoccupied with summoning the image of a consolidated authoritarian state, versus taking the concrete steps needed to unravel liberal democracy as such. It is less concerned with passing laws than it is with projecting an image of dominance over civil society, whether or not there is a durable settlement. It does this through dramatic action whose central purpose is to menace, threaten and otherwise send a message.
The Department of Homeland Security’s recent raid on the Washington home of Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is a striking example of all of the above. The pretext of the raid is immigration enforcement. The White House asserts that Omar obtained her citizenship under false pretenses after she arrived to the United States from Somalia as a child, brought over by her father, who filed the required paperwork.
The specific charge is that Omar was listed as being 17 — and thus eligible for automatic citizenship through her father — when she was actually 18 and a legal adult who would have to obtain citizenship on her own. The raid was a fishing expedition — an attempt to build a case, any case, using materials seized from her home, including her cellphone, notebooks, personal computers and her passport. The goal appears to be to denaturalize Omar and then remove her from the country as an “illegal alien.” As the so-called border czar Tom Homan told Fox News on Saturday, “If you lie during the naturalization process, there is a process to denaturalize somebody. We’ve done it before … and certainly, if the evidence points that way, that could happen.”
Both the charge and the case are obvious nonsense. There is no evidence that Omar lied or otherwise misled the federal government to obtain citizenship. The idea itself comes from the fetid swamps of the online far right — an expression of the anti-Somali bigotry that President Trump has elevated to the equivalent of state ideology. And in turn, the government’s hunt for evidence to wield against Omar is less about combating fraud and more about the president’s racist crusade against Somali Americans as well as his specific disdain for Omar, a vocal (and visible) political opponent of his administration.
It is because the investigation seems likely to fail on the merits — and appears to be nothing more than an attempt to intimidate a political opponent — that the spectacle carries the flavor of cargo cult activity. And yet, it still represents a shocking escalation of the president’s reactionary dominance politics, as well as an assault on a set of basic constitutional guarantees.
The White House seeks to punish Ilhan Omar for exercising her right to free speech. It seeks to curtail Representative Omar’s privileges and immunities under the Constitution’s Speech and Debate clause, which holds that “for any Speech or Debate in either House,” both senators and representatives “shall not be questioned in any other Place.” It also hopes to arrogate the Constitution’s declaration that “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members” so that it can shape the composition of Congress itself.
One striking aspect of the second Trump administration worth noting is the extent to which the president keeps reinventing Stuart absolutism from first principles. Here, the president is all but re-enacting Charles I’s attempt to arrest his five most vocal opponents in the House of Commons in order to force the body into submission.
It shoul"ng, focused its scrutiny on those immigrants who were a thorn in its side, like Goldman.
Goldman’s citizenship came through her former husband, Jacob Kershner, a fellow immigrant and naturalized citizen. But a handful of minor mistakes in his journey to citizenship were grounds to denaturalize him and, more important to federal officials, void Goldman’s claim to citizenship. She was arrested in 1917 for agitating against American involvement in the First World War, in violation of the Espionage Act. A young J. Edgar Hoover, then leading the government’s crusade against radicals, traveled to New York City to witness her deportation.
Most Americans who know this history look back at these episodes with shame and regret. Not so the Trump administration and its allies. For them these moments of authoritarian abuse — when the federal government used its power to target opponents, harass dissidents and hunt disfavored groups — are proof of concept.
The White House seems to think that if it goes through the motions of repression, it can get the same results. Hence the cargo cult quality of its actions here and in other arenas. Not only is there broad and deeply felt opposition to the administration’s attempts to persecute and ostracize its critics but there is little about the politics of the moment that favor the White House and its allies. The president, after all, is more unpopular than he has ever been.
If the Trump administration has one trick, it’s this: to abuse its power in increasingly draconian and autocratic ways, in the hope that it will establish the authoritarian dominance it tried to project. It is terribly destructive. It also doesn’t work. Looking at the growing odds of a Republican electoral catastrophe in November, I don’t think it will.
But if we can be certain of anything, it’s this: They won’t stop trying.
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va."
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