What did Donald Trump do today?

He got a Congresswoman he hates attacked.

 

Trump hates Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Democratic member of Congress for Minneapolis, and has never made any secret of it. The recent terror campaign carried out by ICE and CPB on the city is happening there, as opposed to places like Texas or Florida with vastly greater numbers of undocumented immigrants, in large part because of his fury towards her. 

Rep. Omar is a Black Muslim woman who was born in Somalia and came to the United States as a refugee when she was 12. Any of those things might be enough to get under Trump's notoriously (and now literally) thin skin: he's stopped pretending to conceal his deep-seated racism and misogyny, and attacks on Muslims and immigrants are core to his political brand.

But more than anything, Trump seems infuriated by the fact that Omar is unwilling to let him bully her, and routinely claps back at him when he taunts her or her constituents. Trump doesn't handle criticism well from anyone, and finds it absolutely intolerable coming from women, and seems unable to control himself where she is concerned. He's lied about her citizenship, threatened to have her deported, spread disgusting rumors about her family, said she and Somalis in general were "garbage," and —in a moment of particular irony—said she was a "total scam artist." Unlike many other politicians in both parties, Omar has never let Trump go unanswered.

Most recently, Trump has said she's being "investigated" over her finances. (It's not clear whether this is a "real" thing that he is forcing the government to do at his behest, or just an empty threat.) Trump, anxious to tie her to an unrelated benefit fraud scheme that the state of Minnesota has been investigating for months, has been insinuating that she has been selling her office (another irony) to account for what he says is her net worth in the tens of millions of dollars. That's simply not true; they reflect the total value of the businesses her husband is a partner in—not the value of his share or hers. (By Trump's math, almost every farmer who went bankrupt due to his tariffs this year was a multi-millionaire.)

Tonight, less than a day after Trump once again claimed Omar herself was somehow involved in penny-ante benefits fraud, she was attacked by a man who ran up to her during a speech and sprayed her with an unknown substance from a syringe. The attacker was quickly subdued and arrested, and the chemical he sprayed on her hasn't been identified yet. The attack comes less than a week after another Democratic member of Congress, Maxwell Frost (D-FL), was punched by a man who screamed racist slurs at him and said that Trump would deport him. That attacker was also arrested.

The term for trying to turn a huge crowd against a target, in the knowledge that at least a few individuals in that crowd will probably make threats or commit violent acts, is stochastic terrorism. Trump knows from experience how effective it can be: he's egged on QAnon conspiracy theorists and antisemitic white supremacists, or simply identified someone he imagines is his enemy in public and mused about "bad things" that might happen to them. He's ostentatiously yanked security details away from political enemies he knows are in harm's way and gloated about the extra expense and danger it will bring them. And he's succeeded in ginning up violence against media figures he dislikes, and even his own Vice-President on January 6, 2021.

Omar, for her part, says she was unhurt and undeterred. Her office released a statement tonight: “During her town hall, an agitator tried to attack the Congresswoman by spraying an unknown substance with a syringe. Security and the Minneapolis Police Department quickly apprehended the individual. He is now in custody. The Congresswoman is okay. She continued with her town hall because she doesn’t let bullies win.” 

UPDATE: Trump is now claiming Rep. Omar "probably had herself sprayed."

Why does this matter?

• Trying to incite mobs to violence against political enemies is what dictators do.
  
  
• A president who can't stand being criticized is much too fragile to actually hold the office.