Tuesday, April 16, 2019

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said that an immigrant war refugee turned Congresswoman didn't know how life worked.

Today, Trump was asked to comment on the doctored video he'd posted to Twitter that has led to death threats against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). He responded by saying that he didn't regret anything he'd done, and added:

She is somebody that doesn’t really understand life, real life. What it’s all about.

Rep. Omar was born in Somalia in 1981. When she was a child, her family fled the Somalia Civil War, a conflict that has killed perhaps half a million people and created more than a million refugees. Omar spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya, after which her family applied for asylum status in the United States and moved to Minneapolis. (As a candidate in 2016, before Omar ran for office, Trump tried to win over Minnesota voters by claiming that they had "suffered" at the hands of the Somali refugees living in the state because, Trump had decided, they were joining ISIS.) Omar became a U.S. citizen in 2000 at the age of 17, graduated from the University of North Dakota, and then worked in state politics until she was elected to the Minnesota legislature in 2016 at age 35.

By comparison, Trump was born in New York City in 1946 to an immigrant mother. (His father was born in the United States, although Trump has gotten confused about that several times lately.) He suffered from behavioral problems that caused his father to send him to a private military boarding school. He attended Occidental College, and then Fordham College, and finally the University of Pennsylvania. (He has falsely claimed to be a top student at Penn, and has threatened those schools with legal action if his grades are ever released.) Immediately after receiving his degree, he was suddenly stricken with bone spurs that prevented him from entering the Vietnam draft, according to a podiatrist whose landlord was Trump's father. He spent the remainder of his 20s and early 30s as a part of his father's business empire, and taking part in a long-running tax fraud scheme that helped channel his father's money to him and his siblings tax-free over the course of decades.

Trump didn't say what about "real life" he thought could only be learned at private boarding schools or taking a job in a multi-millionaire father's business empire.

Earlier this month, shortly after Trump's fixation on Omar began, a man who identified himself as a Trump supporter was arrested for calling Omar's office and saying that she was "a fucking terrorist" and that he was "going to put a bullet in her fucking skull."

Who cares?

  • "Real life" happens even to people who aren't Donald Trump.
  • Trying to keep people in line with the threat of violence is what dictators do.
  • People born into solid gold houses shouldn't throw stones.