Donald Trump trained the full weight of the state on Ilhan Omar – the raids, the subpoenas, the threat of exile. Minneapolis answered with a landslide.
For much of the past year, Ilhan Omar lived under a kind of siege few American politicians have ever been asked to endure. The president of the United States did not merely oppose her at the ballot box; he set out, by his own telling, to erase her from public life. And on election night in Minneapolis, the voters of her district answered him with a number that left little room for interpretation: 263,166.
That was the tally Ms. Omar collected on her way to a fifth term in the United States House of Representatives, 76.5 percent of the vote in a corner of Minnesota that has sent her to Washington again and again. Her Republican challenger, John Nagel, took 55,805 votes, or 16.2 percent. An independent, DeVelle Jackson, drew 24,215, or 7.0 percent. The gap between the congresswoman and her nearest rival ran to roughly 207,000 votes, a margin so wide it read less like a contest than a verdict.
What made the verdict remarkable was not its size but its backdrop.
The long campaign against her
Hostility toward Ms. Omar has been a fixture of Donald Trump’s political vocabulary for years, delivered in language that strayed far beyond the ordinary rough trade of partisan combat. He told her to “go back” to the country she had fled as a child. He called her “garbage.” He said she “should be in jail” and declared that she ought to be “sent back to Somalia,” the nation her family escaped when she was a girl in a refugee camp.
The rhetoric did not stay rhetorical. When a man sprayed a liquid at Ms. Omar during a town hall in Minneapolis, an episode that might have drawn sympathy from a sitting president, Mr. Trump instead suggested that she had “probably sprayed herself.”
Then the words gave way to the machinery of the state.
Mr. Trump said the Justice Department and Congress were examining her finances. Three weeks before voters went to the polls, roughly two dozen federal agents arrived at her home in Washington and carried out a raid, taking her phone, her notebooks, her computers and her passport. Her family was served with subpoenas. The administration, according to reports, went further still, exploring whether it could strip her of her citizenship and deport her.
Through all of it, one fact remained stubbornly in place: Ms. Omar has not been charged with any crime. No evidence of wrongdoing has been made public. The full weight of federal authority had been trained on a single member of Congress, and it had produced, so far, no case at all.
A test of who belongs
It is difficult to overstate how unusual this is. Members of Congress trade insults, weather investigations and lose elections. What few have faced is a president who treated a lawmaker’s very presence in the country as a question to be litigated, who moved from calling her a foreigner to attempting, by the account of those around the effort, to make her one again in law.
The campaign against Ms. Omar carried an unmistakable subtext. She is Black, Muslim, a woman and a naturalized citizen who arrived in the United States as a refugee. The demand that she “go back,” the threat of deportation, the suggestion that her citizenship might be revoked, all of it tested a proposition at the center of the American idea: whether a refugee who becomes a citizen and then a legislator holds her place by right, or only on sufferance.
Minneapolis supplied its own answer. The district did not simply re-elect her; it returned her by a landslide, in the same weeks that federal agents were carrying her belongings out of her home. The timing was its own statement. Voters knew what was being done to her, and they knew it had yielded no charges, and they sent her back anyway.
The woman at the center
Ms. Omar’s biography has long been a kind of Rorschach test in American politics, read by her admirers as the fullest expression of the country’s promise and by her detractors as a provocation. She came to the United States as a child, spent years in a Kenyan refugee camp, learned English in Virginia and built a political career in Minnesota that carried her, in 2018, into the first class of Muslim women ever elected to Congress.
That ascent has drawn adoration and venom in roughly equal measure, and the past year delivered the venom in concentrated form, backed this time by subpoenas and federal agents rather than only by social media. That she absorbed it and won is the plainest measure of her resilience. That the voters who know her best delivered more than three-quarters of their ballots to her, with her home still freshly searched and her passport still in government hands, is the plainest measure of theirs.
The president used what he had. The machinery of investigation, the language of exile, the full volume of his bully pulpit. And a refugee from Somalia, having said nothing she could be charged for and having been shown to have done nothing the public could see, was sent back to Congress.
The number on election night was 263,166. The number of criminal charges against her remained zero.
