Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) shot back at President Trump after he mocked her for quoting the Constitution and becoming involved in the nation’s politics.
In an interview Monday on Fox News’s “The Ingraham Angle,” Trump invoked Omar when railing against the Democratic Party.
“I look at somebody that comes from Somalia, where they don’t have anything — they don’t have police, they don’t have military, they don’t have anything,” the president said, referring to Omar, the only lawmaker born in Somalia. “All they have is crime — and she comes in and tells us how to run our country.”
Trump continued, purporting to quote the progressive lawmaker: “’The Constitution says this, the Constitution says…”
“The whole thing is crazy,” he added.
But Omar seemed unfazed by the president’s blow.
“Unlike you, I can read and that’s why I know what the constitution says,” she wrote in a post on social platform X, responding to a clip from the interview.
Omar, a four-term member of Congress, fled from a civil war in Somalia when she was 8 years old and arrived in the U.S. a few years later. She became a citizen in 2000, at 17 years old.
Trump has on multiple occasions suggested that the outspoken Democrat “go back” to Somalia, including in a post on his Truth Social platform earlier this month.
The president, in late September, also joked in the Oval Office about sending Omar “back” to Somalia. He said he met the head of the African nation and “I suggested that maybe he’d like to take her back.”
“He said, ‘I don’t want her,’” he added at the time.
Omar has brushed off threats about her citizenship being taken away.
“I have no worry,” the Minnesota lawmaker said in an interview last month. “I don’t know how they’d take away my citizenship and, like, deport me.”
“But I don’t even know, like, why that’s such a scary threat,” she continued. “I’m not the 8-year-old who escaped war anymore. I’m grown. My kids are grown. Like, I can go live wherever I want.”
The White House responded to the clip on Monday with an image from the campaign trail of Trump waving from a McDonald’s drive thru window.
