Tuesday November 11, 2025
FILE - U.S. President Donald Trump and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., are pictured in separate file photos. The two traded fresh criticism this week after Trump mocked Omar’s constitutional arguments during a Fox News interview, prompting a pointed response from the congresswoman and a follow-up post from the White House.
MINNEAPOLIS, Minn (HOL) — Rep. Ilhan Omar pushed back Monday after President Donald Trump mocked her for citing the U.S. Constitution, setting off a new exchange that drew a rapid response from the White House.
Trump made the remarks on Fox News’s “The Ingraham Angle,” where he criticized Democratic lawmakers and repeated past claims that Omar should “go back” to Somalia. He also dismissed her references to constitutional protections and described Somalia as a country that “doesn’t have anything,” comments widely viewed as inaccurate and inflammatory.
Omar responded on X, writing, “Unlike you, I can read and that’s why I know what the Constitution says,” alongside a clip from the interview. The White House later replied to a separate video of Omar discussing threats about her citizenship by posting a 2024 photo of Trump waving from a McDonald’s drive-thru window, a gesture interpreted as a jab at the president.
The video the White House reacted to showed Omar saying she had “no worry” about suggestions that her citizenship could be revoked. She said she did not believe there was any legal basis to deport a naturalized American and added, “I’m not the 8-year-old who escaped war anymore. I’m grown. My kids are grown. I can go live wherever I want.”
Trump and Omar have
clashed repeatedly since his
first term. The president has often
targeted Omar and other members of the progressive “Squad,” telling them to return to what he described as their “broken and crime-infested” countries. In September, he claimed he had spoken with Somalia’s president about “taking her back” — a story Omar later disputed as invented.
Omar was born in Somalia and fled the country’s civil war as a child before living in a refugee camp in Kenya. She arrived in the United States in 1995, became a citizen in 2000, and was elected to Congress in 2018, becoming the first Somali-American woman to serve in the House and one of the first Muslim women elected to the chamber.