Ilhan Omar Fires Back at Trump: 'You Have Trafficked in Hate Your Whole Life'

By John Wagner, The Washington Post

13 February 19

ep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) responded Wednesday to President Trump’s call for her resignation by accusing him of having “trafficked in hate your whole life” and questioning when he would learn from his experiences, as Omar said she has.

The freshman lawmaker, who fired back at Trump on Twitter, has faced a widespread backlash for suggesting that Israel’s allies in U.S. politics were motivated by money rather than principle.

During a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, Trump said that “anti-Semitism has no place in the United States Congress,” called an apology by Omar “lame” and said she should resign from Congress or give up her seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“You have trafficked in hate your whole life — against Jews, Muslims, Indigenous, immigrants, black people and more,” Omar said in her tweet Thursday morning. “I learned from people impacted by my words. When will you?”

House Republicans have called for the chamber’s Democratic leadership to strip Omar of her assignment on the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) left open the possibility of disciplinary action.

“Apologies are appropriate,” Hoyer said. “But the real test are actions going forward . . . We need to treat one another with respect.”

“If that doesn’t pan out, there may be further actions we need to take,” he added.

House Democratic leaders issued a joint statement on Monday denouncing her use of “anti-Semitic tropes and prejudicial accusations about Israel’s supporters.”

In a pair of tweets on Sunday, Omar had cited Puff Daddy’s 1997 paean to money — “It’s All About the Benjamins” — to paint Israel’s supporters in Congress as beholden to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful lobbying group whose members contribute generously to lawmakers who share its perspective on the Middle East.

Under a hail of criticism from both sides of the aisle, the congresswoman apologized and said she was learning about the “painful history of anti-Semitic tropes.”

In the wake of the controversy, Trump himself has come under scrutiny for comments he made to the Republican Jewish Coalition as a presidential candidate in 2015.

“You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money . . . But that’s okay. You want to control your own politician,” Trump told the group at the time.