One noontime a few weeks ago, I went to lunch with a colleague from the University of Minnesota. We strolled around the corner from our offices to a mutually favorite spot, the Afro Deli, for a hybrid meal of gyro, samosas, falafel, and chai. This Afro Deli location was part of a local chain that had been founded by an immigrant from Djibouti who won a national award as small-business owner of the year. Half of the lunchtime crowd hailed from the university campus, half from the surrounding neighborhood of Cedar-Riverside, whose eponymous high-rise apartment complex is the epicenter of the Twin Cities’ Somali community of about 65,000.
To hear our president tell it, however, I had put my very life in danger by dining with a friend in an African restaurant in a Somali neighborhood. Though Donald Trump visibly dozed off several times during a Cabinet meeting on December 2, the reliable stimulant of nativism stirred him awake long enough to denounce Minnesota’s Somalis as “garbage.” In a Truth Social posting about two weeks earlier, Trump had declared that “Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State.”
It is hardly surprising that Trump reviled the Somalis: African, Muslim, and dark-skinned, they provide a veritable trifecta for presidential bigotry. And with his feral genius for sniffing out the wedgiest of issues, one might say in the manner of a piggy rooting for truffles, Trump levied his broadside in the aftermath of a genuine scandal, in which a largely Somali nongovernmental organization in Minnesota called Feeding Our Future defrauded the federal government of $250 million meant for providing meals during the pandemic lockdowns.
Of course, Trump neglected to mention that it was a self-described “white lady” born and bred in Minnesota who led the NGO and the scheme. The very day before the president’s rant against Somalis, the big fraud news in Minneapolis concerned the guilty plea in a $200,000 embezzlement case—by another white longtime Minnesotan, who had filched the money while serving as CEO of the regional Chamber of Commerce. And let’s just leave aside, for the moment, the curious spectacle of Trump 2.0—whose family has trafficked in conflict of interest and de facto bribery on an epic scale—purporting to be the moral conscience of the nation.
In the immediate term, the impact of Trump’s attack on the Somalis of Minnesota will include Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids against them and the continuation of previous threats to withdraw Temporary Protected Status from refugees and a reimposition of the so-called “Muslim ban” of Trump’s first term on incoming travelers and visa applicants. But there’s also some very relevant history—both recent and more distant—that is vital to understanding the demagogic game that Trump is playing with the Somalis.
The shorter of those arcs goes all the way back to the final days of Trump’s 2016 campaign. On the Sunday before Election Day, Trump held a rally at Minneapolis’s airport to decry the “disaster” that had befallen the state due to Somali immigration. In this earlier iteration of his truffle-hog mode, candidate Trump seized upon an actual crime—the recent conviction of three Somali men for trying to join ISIS—to try to flip Minnesota red, which continues to be a Republican obsession.
One should never underestimate the potency of racism and nativism as political chemicals, as the rise of MAGA amply demonstrates. Yet the strategy of winning Minnesota for the GOP also revealed a deep misunderstanding of what the state has become, which is far from the white-bread Lake Wobegon stereotype that Garrison Keillor meant as satire but many Americans outside the region took as a peer-reviewed ethnography.
Partly because of the active role that its Lutheran churches have taken in refugee resettlement, the Twin Cities as well as outlying cities like St. Cloud and Rochester have large Somali, Hmong, Vietnamese, Ethiopian, and Liberian communities. In the recent mayoral elections, a Somali American state senator named Omar Fateh ran a strong challenge to the Minneapolis incumbent, Jacob Frey, while neighboring St. Paul elected its first Hmong as mayor, Kaohly Her.
At the more granular levels of daily life, the Somalis one encounters in the Twin Cities are the former teachers or engineers now driving for Uber because their prior credentials are not yet recognized. They are also the twenty-ish children of those drivers, fulfilling the family aspiration for upward mobility by attending the University of Minnesota, Augsburg College, Metropolitan State University. They are the caregivers for homebound elders and nursing-home residents. They are the entrepreneurs who have started up hundreds of businesses and brought their cuisine to that very apex of Minnesota culture, the state fair.
None of these achievements absolve the criminals of Feeding Our Future. But it’s also fair to say that the greatest victims of their massive fraud were the vast majority of law-abiding Somalis. The last thing a despot like Donald Trump needs is a pretext that, for a change, happens to be true.
In that respect, even as Trump surely is ignorant of this longer arc of history, his attacks on Somalis in Minnesota employ a playbook used very successfully nearly a century ago against that period’s alien outsiders: the Jews.
To the delight of local antisemites and the chagrin of their co-religionists, Jewish gangsters such as Kid Cann (Isador Blumenfeld) and his kid brother Yiddy Bloom dominated the bootlegging and gambling rackets in downtown Minneapolis, shifting into illegal after-hour liquor sales when Prohibition was repealed in 1933. To protect their business, Cann and company plowed a share of their profits into bribing the police force. Although he escaped conviction, Cann almost certainly assassinated a muckraking journalist, Walter Liggett, whose articles were exposing the underworld.
The reality of Jewish prominence in organized crime provided the ideal justification for Minneapolis’s encompassing regime of structural antisemitism, which ranged from police brutality to surveillance of Jewish students at the University of Minnesota, to restrictive covenants in housing, to, in the spirit of letting no stone go unturned, a ban on Jewish members of the city’s chapter of the AAA automotive club.
While no single Jew-hating figure of that time wielded the equivalent of Trump’s power on the municipal level, many of them anticipated him and MAGA. There were the Christian nationalist minister William Bell Riley, the right-wing dirty trickster Ray Chase, and the itinerant demagogues Gerald L.K. Smith of the America First political party and William Dudley Pelley of the Nazi-style paramilitary group the Silver Shirts. Though Smith and Pelley operated across the country, they found Minneapolis especially receptive to their toxic message.
The caricature of Jews as crooks coexisted for such bigots with the stereotypes of Jews as both rapacious capitalists and violent revolutionaries. The irreconcilables somehow reconciled in just the way that Trump has pilloried Somalis as both cunning con artists and Islamist terrorists. And then as now, the point of instrumentalizing racial or religious hatred was and is to deny political agency to liberals or progressives or Democrats, whether represented in the person of the Minnesota Governor Elmer Benson in the 1930s or his current successor, Tim Walz.
As mayor of Minneapolis in the mid-1940s, a young Hubert Humphrey and his sophisticated and incorruptible police chief, Ed Ryan, decisively severed the supposed link between Jewish crime and Jewish sedition. Ryan cracked down on the downtown gangsters, while Humphrey pushed through a set of antidiscrimination and civil rights laws that put him on the national political radar.
The Minneapolis of today, led by Mayor Frey and police Chief Brian O’Hara, now has its own moment of reckoning on behalf of its own community of the falsely maligned and cynically persecuted. Their vow this week to refuse cooperation with ICE is a vital sign that the spirits of Humphrey and Ryan are girded for battle against the grandiose threats of Trump.
