Denaturalizing Ilhan Omar

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, October 15, 2026

 

Only an outfit as inept as this administration could fumble the politics of executing a terrorist.

 

Most Americans support capital punishment, and I’d guess that even some who lean against it aren’t leaning hard in the case of Nidal Hasan. Hasan was an Army officer when he murdered 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, making him not just a jihadi but a turncoat. And there’s no doubt about his guilt, as there too often is in capital cases. He admits to his rampage. He’s been paralyzed for the last 17 years, in fact, because he was shot in the midst of it.

 

It’s fair to argue that he shouldn’t be executed because no one should be executed, because the state can’t be trusted with the power to kill outside of warfare. But there’s no argument that Hasan doesn’t deserve his sentence.

 

His execution is set for December 3, teeing up a rare opportunity for the current government to do something that’s popular. But Team Trump blew the layup: When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Hasan’s death would be turned into a snuff film, the public recoiled. Two different polls released in the last two days show more than two-thirds of Americans are opposed to livestreaming the execution. One had a full 80 percent against it.

 

Somehow the White House made itself the villain in a drama involving … Nidal Hasan. Having snatched defeat from the jaws of political victory, the president announced a few hours ago that the execution won’t be broadcast after all.

 

I’m excited to watch the administration squander another potential victory by making itself the villain in a drama involving another unsympathetic figure, far-left Israel-hater Rep. Ilhan Omar.

 

The Minnesota Democrat’s home in Washington was searched this week after Homeland Security agents secured a warrant from a federal judge. According to a source who spoke to the New York Times, the warrant “lists a series of potential immigration crimes under investigation, including false statements and fraud in immigration paperwork, as well as a general conspiracy charge.” Jeanine Pirro’s U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. has opened a second probe related to Omar’s finances, a subject in which Joe Biden’s Justice Department likewise took an interest.

 

The immigration claims appear to be related to how Omar became a U.S. citizen. Born in Somalia, she came to America from a Kenyan refugee camp with her family in 1995. She claimed to be 17 when she eventually sought U.S. citizenship; as a minor, she was entitled to it automatically once her father’s own citizenship application was accepted. But if she was actually 18 at the time, as the Trump administration seems to suspect, she would have been an adult and required to apply in her own right. Which she never did.

 

A second line of inquiry has to do with her late father’s U.S. citizenship. He served in the Somali military under the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and fled the country after Barre was toppled, raising suspicions about what his duties under the regime might have been. (Reportedly his nickname was “Colonel.”) If he lied on his application about his activities in his native country, it would mean that he had obtained his U.S. citizenship fraudulently—and therefore so had 17-year-old Ilhan Omar. If he wasn’t entitled to become a citizen, she couldn’t have derived citizenship automatically through him.

 

A third line of inquiry comes from the New York Post. In May 2019, Omar’s staff reached out to sources like Wikipedia, the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress, and the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library to correct the birthdate attributed to her. Those sources listed her as born in 1981—which would have made her 18 when she applied for citizenship. She was actually born in 1982, her staff insisted. They did this “after a video from a political opponent went viral that claimed Omar was fibbing about her age.”

 

She and her aides will doubtless claim that she really was born in 1982 and was merely trying to correct the record. Trump’s investigators will doubtless claim that she’s lying and changed the date to cover her tracks after committing immigration fraud.

 

The goal in all this, per the Wall Street Journal, is “to strip [Omar] of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her, according to U.S. officials and other people familiar with the probe.” Presumably they would send her back to Somalia, where she’s spent fewer years of her life than she has in the United States.

 

This is a hard case to write about.

 

Real Americans.

 

What makes it hard isn’t that it’s complicated but that it isn’t. There’s nothing to say here that readers of this newsletter, or of this site—or observers of American politics generally since January 2025—don’t already know. Denaturalizing Ilhan Omar isn’t some novel development or unexpected turn in Trumpism that requires deep deliberation. It’s the logical endpoint of the ideology, and self-evidently so.

 

All roads lead to this.

 

To a postliberal movement like Trump’s, Omar’s presence in Congress isn’t just irritating, it’s a civic abomination. At the heart of “America First” tribalism is the belief that American greatness depends on preserving the dominance of the traditional ruling tribe. White Christian men, native-born and right-wing in outlook, properly govern the United States. For a black Muslim woman, foreign-born and left-wing politically, to gain governing power is to trigger a full-blown national identity crisis.

 

You know how the slogan goes.

 

Ridding America of “undesirables” by mass-deporting illegal immigrants is the most glaring expression of Trumpists trying to protect their tribe’s dominance, but it’s not the purest expression. The purest expression would be to rid the country of citizens who challenge that dominance. That’s the only way to bring American national identity fully into alignment with postliberals’ “right-wing Christian white guy” tribal identity. If you can’t get rid of the Indians (yet), you can—maybe—at least get rid of Omar.

 

Because Trumpists can’t conceive of her as a “real” American, they’re instinctively suspicious of how she came to be a real American, just as they were with Barack Obama. Donald Trump, who made his first big splash in right-wing politics by questioning Obama’s natural-born status, is using the power of his office to convert those suspicions into a matter for federal law enforcement.

 

And federal law enforcement is more than willing to oblige, another point that’s almost too obvious to need stating. Especially as competent officials at the DOJ continue to exit the administration and are replaced by cranks and miscreants.

 

Vendetta.

 

The one bit of credibility in this week’s search of her home is the fact that the feds got a warrant, which means there must be some evidence of wrongdoing. Or does it?

 

The Trump Justice Department has lied routinely to federal judges, leading some to revisit “the presumption of regularity” that courts have traditionally extended to the government by assuming its good faith. Would it also be willing to lie to a federal judge for the sake of getting a warrant for a search that everyone involved understood would make the president very happy three weeks out from an election?

 

Why wouldn’t it? What benefit of the doubt has the administration earned about its probity after 21 months of disgraceful legal scumbaggery?

 

The essential thing to understand about Homeland Security executing this search now, with the midterms around the corner, is this: They knew how it would look.

 

The DOJ famously has a rule that states federal agents “may never select the timing of any action, including investigative steps, criminal charges, or statements, for the purpose of affecting any election, or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.” Traditionally, that has meant that law enforcement lays off taking actions with political valence in the 60 days before an election.

 

That rule is there because, until we started electing postliberal degenerates, politicians worried that Americans would lose faith in law enforcement if they suspected that partisan motives were influencing criminal investigations in the thick of a campaign. Trump’s administration wants Americans to suspect that. Not for the first time, it’s gone out of its way to make official action appear motivated by a political vendetta.

 

Executing a search related to a decades-old citizenship application from a congresswoman running for reelection obviously could have waited until after Election Day. Trump’s team did it now because they meant to intimidate their political enemies, as if to say, “Look what we’re willing to do.” They knew how it would look.

 

True to form, the president himself is barely pretending that there isn’t a malicious purpose to the investigation. Asked this week whether he had anything to do with the search of Omar’s home, he barely denied it: “I think she’s a terrible person, but that’s really up to the DOJ.” On Monday he seized on the news by bringing her up at a rally during one of his usual broadsides against Somali Americans, insisting, “They cheat on everything. We’re not going to stand for it.” (The crowd responded by chanting “deport.”) He’s been doing that for years, referring to Omar last December as “garbage” en route to saying of Somalis, “their country stinks, and we don’t want them in our country.”

 

Just as J.D. Vance rationalized his smear about Haitians in Ohio eating their neighbors’ pets as illustrating a fake-but-accurate “larger truth” about Haitian migrants, Trump is framing his interest in Omar’s citizenship as illustrating a “larger truth” about Somalis. They’re cheaters. They cheated taxpayers out of millions of dollars in Minnesota, so why wouldn’t the congresswoman have cheated in how she became an American?

 

With a national election weeks away, any other administration would be straining to convince Americans that nothing vindictive was afoot here, that there was a legitimate legal reason for the hair-raising spectacle of searching an opposing-party congresswoman’s home. Trump and his administration are straining to convince Americans of the opposite. It’s a vendetta, they’re not sorry, and they’re going to keep doing it.

 

In fact, the evidence taken from Omar’s home sounds suspiciously like fodder for a “fishing expedition” by the feds. Among the items seized were “her cellphone, notebooks, personal computers and her passport,” a remarkable haul for a case involving old citizenship paperwork. You don’t think the Trump administration would stoop to using the immigration case as a pretext to go rifling through an enemy’s files in hopes of finding some more damning wrongdoing, do you?

 

Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime. The country voted for norm-busting postliberal ruthlessness in 2024, and that’s what it got.

 

The wrong things.

 

But just because idiotic Americans voted for it doesn’t mean they’re going to like it. My guess is that the White House’s ruthlessness in this dispute will alienate a popular majority just as it did when Hegseth proposed turning Hasan’s execution into death porn.

 

If you had to summarize Americans’ grievances with the president in a single line as the midterms approach, it would be: He’s focused on the wrong things. Voters wanted cheaper goods and no foreign turmoil; he gave them tariffs, war with Iran, and an oil crisis. And he did it while yammering endlessly about his construction projects around D.C., as if to underline how little he cared about Americans’ priorities or the hardship he had created for them.

 

Even Trump’s one real achievement, reducing illegal immigration, has been poisoned by ICE’s renegade behavior and a misplaced emphasis on deporting immigrants en masse instead of removing violent criminals. That tone-deafness has had predictable consequences for public opinion. Now here comes the president to demonstrate how little he cares about opinion on immigration too by making Ilhan Omar—who’s not only not a violent criminal but a U.S. citizen and member of Congress—a set piece in his enforcement pageant.

 

He’s focused on the wrong things.

 

Per the Journal, more than a dozen subpoenas related to the case have been issued to Omar’s family, to give you a sense of how many resources are being marshaled to pursue her. Meanwhile, NPR reported a few weeks ago that “deep cuts” have been made to FBI counterintelligence units across the country as agents are reassigned to chase Trump’s immigration goals. (“It’s terrifying, honestly,” one source told the outlet. “Threats are growing and we’re facing it with less and less. Not a recipe for success.”) Somehow, with the war still not yet resolved, thwarting Iranian terrorism has become a lower priority for the Trump administration while deporting Omar has become a higher one. He’s focused on the wrong things.

 

Being focused on the wrong things is what happens when a government is led by a grandiose narcissist backed by a cult of personality and egged on by postliberal apparatchiks who believe that “saving the country” by protecting the tribe’s power to govern takes precedence over the will of the American majority.

 

Even if the feds manage to dig something up substantiating fraud in Omar’s citizenship paperwork, how likely are Americans to support penalizing her for it? Omar will say that she was only 17 or 18 at the time and that her father filled out her application; having been brought to the United States by a parent unlawfully, she’ll be in basically the same position as so-called “dreamers” are. And Americans are very sympathetic to dreamers.

 

“Should a member of Congress who’s lived most of her life in America be sent back to the third world because her dad did something shady and the president hates her guts?” Where do you think the non-chud majority lands on that?

 

Where would it land on this question? “Do you think the Trump administration would be investigating Rep. Ilhan Omar if she were a Republican who supports the president?” We all know the answer—and it’s an interesting answer, because it contradicts the point I made earlier about tribalism. If postliberalism is all about preserving the dominance of the white male-led Christian right-wing tribe, Omar’s political sympathies shouldn’t influence whether she gets to stay or go, right?

 

But in practice they do, of course. If she put on the red cap tomorrow, the denaturalization effort against her would end. Consider that a postliberal gesture toward the reality of trying to purge nonwhite citizens from a country with 140 million of them. You can stay—if you agree that our tribe is in charge.

 

Coming to a head.

 

I’m struck by the fact that the effort to denaturalize Omar is playing out alongside the betrayal of Ukraine.

 

The two have nothing to do with each other in substance, but they’re unusually extreme examples of ruthlessness even by Trump’s standards. If you had asked me in 2024 what the worst-case scenario was for postliberal foreign policy, I’d have said something like, “allying with Russia.” If you’d asked what the worst case for postliberal domestic policy was, I might well have said, “trying to strip ‘undesirables’ of their citizenship.”

 

Here they are. Side by side. Postliberalism has come to a head.

 

One can’t help but interpret both efforts as reactions to a likely electoral wipeout that’s now less than three weeks away. On Monday I wondered if Trump siding with Moscow was a sort of sneak preview of how he intends to govern during his lame-duck period, getting a jump of a few weeks on the freedom he’ll soon enjoy to do whatever he likes abroad. The Omar investigation might be a domestic version of that. There are still many presidential enemies who have yet to face “retribution” for disliking him; once the midterms are over, the time left to him to persecute them will pass quickly.

 

He might be getting a jump on that too.

 

But if you want to believe that this is all about influencing the election itself, there’s an argument there as well. Trump may have thrown a tantrum over Ukraine’s attacks on Russian oil refineries simply because he hopes to persuade undecided voters to blame high gas prices on something other than his stupid war. Likewise, pursuing Omar might be his way of trying to goose flagging Republican enthusiasm before the vote (especially in Omar’s home state of Minnesota, where the Senate race is tight). If you’re a MAGA fan disappointed in him over the war and inflation and the Epstein files and the fact that his exposé of the deep state’s “grand conspiracy” has fallen apart, buck up: He’s doing his best to nuke a Muslim congresswoman’s citizenship and put her on a plane back to Mogadishu.

 

If that doesn’t get you excited to vote—sorry, Marjorie!—I don’t know what will.