Politics
Where Is the Outrage Over Trump’s Racist Targeting of Ilhan Omar?
The establishment press and some Democrats are strangely mute over the president’s flagrant abuse of the legal system.
by Jeet Heer
October 16, 2026
The Nation
Donald Trump has long fantasized about deporting Representative Ilhan Omar. In 2019, Trump lashed out against Omar and her congressional colleagues Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley—all left-wing Democrats and women of color and part of the “Squad.” Deploying a familiar xenophobic jibe, Trump taunted, “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” For three of the Squad, Trump’s threat was vile but empty: Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and Pressley were all born in the United States.
But for Omar, Trump’s words carried a direct intent of harm. Omar was born in Somalia, came to the United States at age 8 as a refugee, and was eventually granted citizenship at age 17 in 2000. On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that in 2019, the same year Trump was telling Omar to “go back” to where she came from, his administration ordered immigration officials to comb through her personal records to find evidence of fraud that could lead to her removal from the US. This fishing expedition came up empty-handed.
Never one to be defeated by a mere lack of evidence, Trump has persisted in calling for Omar’s deportation ever since—calls that have ramped up over the last year. In January, he said Omar should be sent “back to Somalia,” a call he repeated the following month. In March, Vice President JD Vance joined in, bluntly declaring, without evidence, that Omar “definitely committed immigration fraud.”
There are ample reasons why Omar has been one of Trump’s favorite punching bags. As a leading leftist in Congress, she is a natural antagonist. But, more importantly, as a fearless Somali American woman, she excites all the passions of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny that animate Trump and his MAGA movement.
Given the long history of Trump’s vendetta against Omar, it was ultimately not surprising when the Department of Homeland Security raided her home this week in search of evidence of immigration fraud, a move that The Wall Street Journal reports is motivated by a goal of stripping her of her citizenship.
The campaign against Omar stinks to high heaven of partisanship and bigotry. It is also part of a larger pattern of Trump’s weaponization of law enforcement to punish perceived enemies. As The New Yorker documented recently, Trump’s persecutions have done immense harm to the Department of Justice:
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Numerous attorneys have been pushed out or fired after refusing to prosecute such Trump enemies as the former F.B.I. director James Comey and the New York attorney general Letitia James. When these vindictive prosecutions eventually fell under scrutiny in courtrooms, they didn’t fare well. It is extremely rare for grand juries to dismiss charges brought by federal prosecutors, but the case against James, who was accused of committing mortgage fraud, has been rejected twice. Indictments of James and Comey were initially secured by Lindsey Halligan, a lawyer and a former beauty-pageant contestant whom Trump had appointed as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, even though she’d had no experience as a prosecutor. But a magistrate judge subsequently reprimanded her for a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps,” including repeatedly misstating the law to grand jurors. Another judge then dismissed both cases, ruling that Halligan had been appointed unlawfully.
But there’s a striking fact that sets the malicious prosecution apart: Unlike earlier victims of Trump’s lawless abuse of the justice system, Omar isn’t getting a full-throated defense from the political and media elite.
Omar does have people fighting on her side. As my Nation colleague John Nichols reports, she remains popular with her constituents in Minnesota, and the state’s Democratic Party has rallied to her side. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries decried Trump’s “vile personal attacks” and the fact that Trump’s “violent mass deportation machine has descended upon the home of a duly elected Member of Congress and her family.” Even former Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was critical of Trump. In a post on X.com, Greene asked how “pretending to get ready to deport Ilhan Omar is going to bring gas down under $2, make health insurance freaking affordable, make a family’s weekly grocery bill make sense, and stop sending our beloved military off to fight for another fucking foreign war???”
Greene’s pointed rebuke of Trump stands in sharp contrast to Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, who in the five days since the raid has yet to say one word in defense of Omar.
Schumer’s silence is hardly surprising. Because Omar has been outspoken in her criticism of Israel and the Israel lobby, establishment Democrats such as Schumer have often kept their distance from her.
Omar’s criticism of Israel and her larger anti-war stance are overwhelmingly popular with Democratic Party voters and have majority support with the general public. According to a recent poll by Project 270, 67 percent of the public want to end overseas war, and 51 percent believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza (as against 29 percent who deny that genocide has occurred). But these positions are less popular with the political and media elite.
Other victims of Trump’s wrath have been turned into media heroes. But Omar is being treated differently. Writing in The Intercept, Adam Johnson drew a pointed contrast between the Omar raid and the August 2025 raid on the home of John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser turned critic.
The very day of the Bolton raid, we saw scathing editorials from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Over the next week, each of these newspapers also published separate pieces from their opinion staff opposing the raid, casting doubt on its legitimacy, and otherwise leveling outrage at the obvious power grab. The raid was explicitly condemned in Politico, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, which published four different indignant columns.
The raid on Omar’s home has thus far received zero of the above media interventions. No editorials, no opinion columns in the Times, Post, or Journal; no preening in The New Yorker or Politico or Atlantic about the erosion of “rule of law.” The Atlantic did run an article on the Omar raid but it was equivocal and Both Sides in its tone…
As Johnson notes, the reason for the difference in treatment is simply one of identity: Omar is a critic of the establishment, while Bolton is a fixture of the national security state.
On his Unpopular Front Substack, John Ganz also noted that the response to the Omar raid has been “muted” and “tepid.” He suspected the reason might be complacency, due to the “repeated failure of this regime to prosecute its enemies.” But Ganz rightly notes that the attack on Omar is one of the most disturbing events of Trump’s presidency, since it upturns the core principles of liberal democracy:
[T]he attack on citizenship itself is both the very essence of the Trump movement and its most dangerous feature. From birtherism to the stolen-election myth, Trumpism can be understood as the notion that some Americans are not really Americans, that their political rights are illegitimate, and that the nation must be purged of these interlopers.
Ganz is right to highlight the dangers of Trump’s actions. One could add that there is a dual threat: Trump’s subversion of liberal democracy is aided and abetted by an establishment that is so committed to fending off outsiders that it can’t be bothered to defend Ilhan Omar at this crucial moment.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jeet Heer
Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/ramaswamy-acton-attack-ad/
Politics
Vivek Ramaswamy’s New Attack Ad Should Be a National Scandal
The Ohio GOP gubernatorial candidate has accused his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, of lying about being raped when she was 12 years old.
by Chris Lehmann
October 22, 2026
The Nation
There are vile and amoral political actors who will stop at nothing to promote their venal interests—and then there’s Ohio GOP gubernatorial hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy. The biotech billionaire mounted a vanity 2024 presidential run to brand himself as a Gen Z mini-Trump and went on to codirect the nihilist DOGE assault on governance until Elon Musk’s more capacious ego muscled him aside. After both these self-branding efforts flatlined, Ramaswamy decided to emulate the career path of Vice President JD Vance, leveraging his sketchy venture-capitalist fortune into a run for statewide office in his native Ohio.
Ramaswamy has been in a tight and ugly contest with former state health commissioner Amy Acton that, against all odds, became exponentially more repulsive this week with the release of a digital ad featuring Acton’s estranged mother. At the age of 12, Acton and her younger brother had been removed from their mother’s home in 1978 after her stepfather, Cletis Arthur, was arrested and charged with the rape of his stepdaughter. Their biological father, Gerald Stearns, was granted custody of Acton and her brother; her mother, Donna, and her accused rapist then skipped out on bond. Acton told the Youngstown Vindicator that her last contact with her mom came in the courtroom where the custody case was held: “I went to give her a kiss, and she just turned her cheek away. That was the last time I ever saw her.”
Gleefully mining the trauma of an abused 12-year-old, Ramaswamy’s campaign cut an ad in which Donna Arthur proclaims, after 48 years of estrangement founded on her allegiance to her daughter’s abuser, that
I love my daughter, but when I saw her lying about her opponent—and it’s not easy for a mother to say this—but Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She’s lied her entire life. My daughter needs help, and she can’t help you if she needs help herself.
When the ad surfaced as part of an online poll, it met with a proper wave of outrage and disbelief. A MAGA movement that’s long dismissed and excused sexual assault, up to and including President Donald Trump’s special pleading for the defendants in the Cornell gang-rape case, was now attacking the credibility of a 12-year-old rape victim. It’s a textbook illustration of the abusers’ defense tactic known as DARVO—deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender.
Only this sleazy instance of the practice was doubling as a political attack ad. Acton’s campaign responded with a statement from her brother, Philip Stearns, pointing out the obvious: “It’s not surprising that Vivek Ramaswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at twelve years old from our birth mother’s husband into a political talking point. After he was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died.” Acton’s campaign then released an ad in which her brother explained, “I experienced a lot of abuse, but Amy got the worst of it…. Shame on Vivek. It’s the contempt he has for Amy. It’s the contempt he has for Ohio. He’s not fit to lead.” Former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley and conservative pundit Meghan McCain echoed the same sentiment, and a host of other political figures have denounced the gutter attack.
But Ramaswamy, being Ramaswamy, is unfazed—indeed, after his campaign initially wouldn’t avow responsibility for the spot, it announced that it was spending $4 million to broadcast it during the homestretch of the race. (Ramaswamy’s campaign has so far spent more than $100 million, more than tripling outlays from Acton’s team.) His press flack, Connie Luck, continued playing up the smear, with a disingenuous disclaimer professing that “we don’t know what happened between Amy and her mother, who first spoke out about Amy in 2020,” and then parroting the mother’s attack: “We know that Amy Acton is a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth that the public needs to be aware of before deciding who to entrust as governor.”
Ramaswamy has duplicated the same sleazy rhetorical two-step, telling USA Today that Acton’s mother “has spoken out for years,” adding that “Amy Acton has been repeatedly and serially dishonest during this campaign and for much of her record in public service.” (The charge of unhinged mendacity coming from Ramaswamy is, shall we say, a rich one, given that his campaign had unleashed an earlier attack ad featuring the testimony of an Ohio resident blaming Acton’s handling of the Covid crisis for her mother’s death—only for it later to emerge that the woman had actually lived, and died, in Kentucky.)
The fallout from the ad seems likely to backfire on Ramaswamy, who clearly possesses even worse political instincts than his Buckeye State mentor, the gilded hillbilly-whisperer Vance. (Indeed, in an Ohio campaign stop, the vice president reprised the anemic bad-faith defenses Ramaswamy and his flack offered for the spot, complaining in his trademark online-bro register of rudderless grievance that “the media and the Democrats in the state of Ohio are obsessed because Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and call Amy Acton a liar.”) Acton had already opened a seven-point lead in the race, according to the latest Marist poll, and it’s hard to see how Ramaswamy’s desperate smear job will bring independents, suburban women, and anyone still maintaining a shred of common human decency into the GOP camp. Any honest assessment of Ramaswamy’s prospects in the race’s final week and half should begin and end with the 2012 saga of Todd Aiken, the Missouri GOP Senate candidate brought down by his demented comments on how “legitimate rape” rarely produces pregnancies—and therefore its victims should be denied access to abortion.
But to judge by the media coverage thus far, there’s a good chance that the Ramaswamy rape ad will escape Midwest containment, and come to symbolize the depravity and corruption of today’s Republican Party in the minds of many voters. There is a striking precedent for such a development—the impact of Florida GOP Representative Mark Foley’s resignation from Congress just prior to the 2006 midterms. Foley, the longtime director of the House page program, had long been rumored to have abused that post for sexually predatory ends. After a series of damning messages proving out those charges in unmistakable intimate detail surfaced, Foley resigned from Congress on September 29.
The scandal crystallized many impressions of rampant GOP corruption then percolating through the mediasphere, from the crass cynicism and greed dramatized in the downfall of Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff to the epic mismanagement of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. The Democrats had indeed sought to make Republican corruption a central issue in that midterm cycle—but until the Foley scandal broke, their pitch came across as too procedural and removed from the daily lives of most Americans to land effectively; it hinged mostly on Abramoff’s convoluted deals to represent Native American casino interests, and pay-to-play accords in the gilded precincts of the Beltway. But here was the Republican congressional leadership plainly covering up the actions of a sexual predator targeting idealistic young men under his direction. (The reasons for then–Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert’s dilatory handling of the Foley affair would later become painfully clear when he was also exposed as a serial sexual predator, who had exploited the high-school students in his charge when he was a high-school teacher and wrestling coach.)
It’s striking how many parallels this midterm cycle shares with 2006, from a Republican Party at a loss to distance itself from its president’s unpopular war in the Middle East, his mishandling of the economy, and his breathtaking record of corruption. But Ramaswamy’s blunder, like the earlier Foley debacle for the GOP, may well reinforce the party’s justly earned reputation as an enabler of sexual predation and an enthusiastic defender of the manifold abuses of women normalized by the online manosphere. Especially after the uprising over the horrific gang-rape at Cornell, which has led to the predictable doxing and defamation efforts from the online right, the bid to discredit a rape victim who was 12 years old when her predator was arrested looks pathological in the minds of fair-minded observers. It’s now up to Democratic leaders to make sure no one in the country is allowed to forget Vivek Ramaswamy’s moral depravity—or his ambition to be the Trump figure for the next generation of right-wing misogynists—between now and November 3.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Chris Lehmann
Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He was formerly editor of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).
by Branko Marcetic
October 15, 2026
Jacobin
Up until now, the Donald Trump-J. D. Vance administration has been busy weaponizing the US immigration system against fairly low-level political opponents: college students protesting US support for Israel's genocide, independent journalists applying scrutiny to government policies, or random tourists who happened to be critical of the president and his lackeys. Now it's taking the unprecedented step of turning it against a sitting member of Congress.
The federal raid on Squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar's home carried out earlier this week has now all but officially been confirmed to be an immigration-related investigation trying to strip her of US citizenship and deport her, as sources separately relayed to Fox News, the New York Post, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. It is just the latest and most extreme case of Trump and his people using the US immigration system and the massive bureaucracy that exists to enforce it as a vehicle for political repression based on a thinly veiled excuse.
There's little doubt this is politically motivated. It's not just that Omar has already been investigated for this with no charges to show for it, that this immigration history has been a right-wing media obsession for years, or that Trump and his underlings — who have turned the Department of Justice into the president's personal vehicle for score-settling on his many grudges — have singled out Omar as a target for the better part of a decade, often by flinging around wild and unproven accusations about her immigration history and repeatedly threatening to deport her.
It's clearly politically motivated because they've been openly saying they would do exactly what is happening now. Besides Trump's constant threats to deport her, the wife of one of Trump's top advisers, Stephen Miller, reacted to the news of the raid by tweeting, "Promise made, promise kept," before swiftly deleting it. Vice President Vance declared seven months ago that Omar "definitely committed immigration fraud."
Vance is now saying that the White House isn't involved and that they simply want "to let the law, the facts drive this" — but immediately undercut this cleanup attempt by then railing against Omar for "hav[ing] such disdain and such rage at the country that gave her a better life," before reminding the interviewer they would "follow the law" if they discovered a crime. They get so excited at the idea of deporting one of their fiercest critics that they can't help themselves.
To put it plainly, Trump and company long ago decided that Omar is guilty of whatever they're going to accuse her of and that she should be exiled from her country. This raid and whatever investigation comes of it is, to them, just a formality.
No administration in modern memory has targeted a congressperson like this, and certainly not with weeks to go before she's up for reelection — since a criminal investigation, which may not even result in charges, let alone any guilty verdict, has the obvious potential to be a politically damaging "October surprise" (even if it ends up being completely free of substance).
The fact that they're carrying out this unprecedented move is a major escalation of two separate Trump-Vance administration policies. One is its transformation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in particular, into a tool for intimidating the many swaths of the country that do not like the president or his sidekick. (The raid was conducted by Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of ICE.) That approach has seen ICE kill at least three US citizens and many more noncitizens as well as illegally detain hundreds of citizens and deport around a dozen of them.
The less-well-known policy is the administration's push to turbocharge denaturalizations, which are now at unheard-of levels. The administration has eagerly publicized the cases where this has been aimed at violent criminals convicted for heinous crimes. But given that the investigation into Omar is being done with an eye to denaturalizing her, too, it raises the question of how many of these other denaturalization cases may be similarly politically driven.
It's worth remembering at this point that Vance gave his personal endorsement to a book that called for weaponizing the immigration system against the Right's political adversaries in exactly this way, with the Red Scares of last century as its model.
Ironically, as the Trump-Vance administration accelerates its preplanned crackdown on the Left, it's nakedly letting literally scores of right-wing criminals off the hook for their offenses.
A Reuters report earlier this week revealed how the White House has turned the presidential pardon into a system of personal patronage, trading clemency and a clean slate for past crimes for favors, which eighty-five mostly conservatives have benefited from so far — including a former Republican official who fundraised off of a dead police officer, then used the proceeds to buy herself plastic surgery and other goodies.
It also mirrors the Trump-Vance administration's policy toward Latin America. There it has freed a right-wing former president convicted of drug trafficking and otherwise politically gotten into bed with local alleged narcotraffickers while at the same time abducting a a left-wing leader on drug-trafficking charges, fueling a crackdown on other left-leaning officials in the region on similar grounds, and carrying out a campaign of indiscriminate murder in international waters on the basis of stopping the drug trade (which it has miserably failed at actually doing).
This is the Trump-Vance ethos in a nutshell: maximum pressure and punishment for political opponents spuriously accused of crimes and maximum leniency for actual criminals who happen to be the duo's political allies.
There is one more thing to say about this, which is that everything laid out here is, sadly, not the unique behavior of two particularly power-hungry right-wing officials in the United States. This is just arguably the most extreme instance of what has now become shamefully standard across Western democracies, whether governed by liberals or conservatives: of using the immigration system as a way to punish and silence individuals whose speech those in power disagree with, since immigration systems have a variety of legal loopholes and few to no real constitutional protections.
Look at what happened just this past week. Russian journalist and exiled Vladimir Putin critic Leonid Ragozin was officially notified that he was being expelled from Latvia, which he called home for more than a decade, by government decree — explicitly because of his critical reporting on the European role in the war in Ukraine, and likely also as belated political reprisal for years-old reporting that embarrassed the Latvian political elite. Meanwhile, former British diplomat Ian Proud was detained for hours at Heathrow airport and treated like a criminal — searched, fingerprints and DNA taken, electronics seized — under a recently passed (by the Labour government) anti-terrorism statute, all for the crime of having visited Russia to attend a conference.
Remember when Vance, at the beginning of his tenure, did a long, pompous speech tut-tutting European officials for being hostile to "the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion" and reminding them that "there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people"? And European officials responded with indignation that anyone would deign to dress them down on this subject?
Less than two years later, it's hard to know which of them was the bigger hypocrite — or even which of the two places Vance was describing in his speech.
[This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture.]
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.
