Trump Insists Ilhan Omar Is Part of Minnesota Fraud in Racist Rant

The president is thrusting some of the blame for Minnesota’s day care scandal onto Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar.

State officials have come under fire since right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley reported Friday that empty or abandoned day care facilities were still receiving millions of dollars in taxpayer funds.

The Department of Health and Human Services paused $185 million in aid to the state in light of the video, despite the fact that elements of Shirley’s report were incorrect or inadequately reported. At least two of the centers featured in Shirley’s video had been closed for several years, Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth and Families told NewsNation.

But the nitty gritty of the situation didn’t matter to Donald Trump, who baselessly asserted on Truth Social Wednesday that Omar was one of the scammers sucking up undue funds.

“Much of the Minnesota Fraud, up to 90 percent, is caused by people that came into our Country, illegally, from Somalia,” Trump posted. “‘Congresswoman’ Omar, an ungrateful loser who only complains and never contributes, is one of the many scammers.”

More than a dozen schemes have popped up in Minnesota’s safety net programs in recent years, many of them involving members of the state’s Somali population. They haven’t gone unchecked: more than 90 Minnesotans were charged in federal fraud investigations that began under the Biden administration, at least 60 of which have resulted in convictions.

But Omar, the first Somali-American lawmaker and one of the first Muslim women in Congress, doesn’t have any connection to the fraudsters beyond her heritage.

Instead, it was clear that Trump was singularly interested in attacking Omar’s ethnicity, drudging up an old right-wing conspiracy that the lawmaker had married her brother.

“Did she really marry her brother?” Trump asked rhetorically in his post. “Lowlifes like this can only be a liability to our Country’s greatness. Send them back from where they came, Somalia, perhaps the worst, and most corrupt, country on earth. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

MAGA conservatives have rumbled for years—without evidence—that Omar married her brother to bring him into the U.S. The conspiracy first emerged during her 2016 campaign for the Minnesota state legislature in a since-deleted post on the conservative blog Power Line, where an anonymous source was quoted as saying that Omar’s ex-husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was related to her by blood.

Omar has vehemently and repeatedly denied the unfounded allegations, which have been disproven by her marriage certificate. At the time, Omar described the insinuation that she had married her brother to be “absurd and offensive.”