Trump’s Attacks on Somalis Is Stochastic Terrorism Aimed at Ilhan Omar
- john raymond
- 19 hours ago
- 4 min read
President Trump’s latest tirades against Somali immigrants are not generic racism or improvisational cruelty. They are a textbook case of stochastic terrorism, calibrated to place a target on the back of one person above all others: Representative Ilhan Omar.
Over the last several days, Trump has used the platform of the presidency to describe Somali immigrants in Minnesota as “garbage,” claim they “contribute nothing,” and say he does not want them “in our country,” while suggesting they have “destroyed” parts of the United States.
Minnesota is home to the largest Somali community in the United States, and Trump’s comments have come in the immediate context of a planned federal enforcement operation aimed specifically at Somalis in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area and the termination of Temporary Protected Status for Somali nationals.
In the same breath, he has again singled out Ilhan Omar — Somali-born, Black, Muslim, and Minnesota’s most famous Somali-American — calling her “garbage” and implying she should not be in the country at all, despite her status as a naturalized U.S. citizen.
That combination is not random. It is structure.
Stochastic terrorism, as defined in scholarship and mainstream reference works, is the repeated use of vilifying, dehumanizing rhetoric by a political leader that predictably raises the risk that some supporter will commit violence against the targeted person or group, even though no explicit order is given.
The mechanism is probabilistic: saturate an audience with the message that a named enemy or community is dangerous, corrupt, subhuman, or does not belong; some fraction of that audience will eventually “take the hint” and act.
The speaker preserves legal deniability by never saying “attack them” outright, but the causal path — speech to atmosphere to lone actor — is now well understood in the literature on political violence.
Trump’s relationship to Ilhan Omar has followed exactly this script for years. In 2019 he told her and three other women of color in Congress to “go back” to where they came from, despite all being U.S. citizens, and then used a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, to intensify the attack.
As he misrepresented Omar’s comments and painted her as contemptuous and un-American, the crowd erupted into a “send her back” chant that he allowed to run for roughly 13 seconds before resuming his speech; he later praised the crowd as “incredible patriots.”
After those attacks, Omar reported a spike in death threats, many explicitly referencing Trump’s rhetoric; major outlets documented the surge and quoted her warning that the president was directly endangering her life.
The pattern is familiar: demonize, dehumanize, watch the threats escalate, disavow responsibility, and repeat.
What is new in December 2025 is the way Trump has broadened the field of fire from Omar to the entire Somali community, and then collapsed the distinction between the two. When he calls Somali immigrants “garbage” and, in the same set of remarks, calls Ilhan Omar “garbage” who should not be in the country, he is telling his audience that she is the embodiment of a despised out-group and that that out-group is indistinguishable from her.
When those words are spoken from the Cabinet table while federal agents prepare a targeted enforcement operation against Somalis in her home state, the message to his base is unmistakable: these people, and their most visible representative, are legitimate targets for state force and, by implication, for private vigilantism.
Trump and his allies try to hang all of this on a real but limited fraud scandal involving some Somali defendants in Minnesota. But federal authorities and local leaders have been explicit: isolated prosecutions do not justify smearing an entire community of tens of thousands, most of whom are citizens, business owners, workers, and students.
Recent economic analysis shows Somali Minnesotans generating at least $500 million in income annually, paying around $67 million in state and local taxes, and contributing billions to the state economy.
The numbers refute the caricature; the caricature persists because Trump thinks it is a useful weapon.
That weapon is built from the standard components described in the stochastic terrorism literature: scapegoating, dehumanization, and the erasure of moral boundaries around violence.
Analysts and legal scholars note that stochastic terrorists “demonize and dehumanize groups of people through propaganda to incite ‘lone wolf’ violence,” relying on implicit cues that only some listeners will perceive as a call to action.
In Trump’s hands, Somali immigrants become “garbage” who “destroy” their surroundings and “contribute nothing,” while Ilhan Omar becomes the face of that alleged corruption and danger.
When such language is repeated by the president and amplified by allied media, the statistical risk that one of his admirers will escalate from verbal hatred to physical action is no longer speculative; it is baked into the design.
We know this not just in theory but from experience. The period after “send her back” and the 9/11 smears saw exactly what the model predicts: a measurable escalation in explicit threats against Omar, some detailed enough to lead to arrests.
We have seen comparable pathways in other contexts, from abortion providers to LGBTQ venues, where sustained demonization has preceded lone-actor attacks that match the rhetorical script.
There is no reason to pretend that the same architecture, deployed from the Oval Office against a Black Muslim congresswoman and her community, will behave differently this time.
Labeling this correctly matters. Calling it “divisive rhetoric” or “controversial comments” obscures the operational logic at work. Trump’s attacks on Somalis are doing three things at once: they are energizing a racist base, justifying a discriminatory enforcement campaign, and raising the background probability that someone will decide to “deal with” Ilhan Omar or the people who look like her.
That is exactly what stochastic terrorism is meant to name: the use of mass, dehumanizing speech by a powerful figure to generate a predictable but deniable pattern of violence against a chosen target.
When the president of the United States stands before the cameras and announces that a specific immigrant community is “garbage” and that its most famous representative in Congress is also “garbage” who does not belong here, while federal agents fan out through that community’s neighborhoods, we are not in the realm of metaphor. We are watching a head of state aim a probabilistic weapon at Ilhan Omar and at Somali Americans more broadly, knowing from past experience what that weapon does.
We should say so plainly: Trump’s attacks on Somalis are not just racist. They are stochastic terrorism aimed directly at Ilhan Omar and others like her.