Brooks: Trump’s current tirade targeting Somali Minnesotans should come as no surprise

When a president calls his own citizens garbage, it tells you more about him than them.

After struggling to stay awake through Tuesday’s cabinet meeting, President Donald Trump perked up enough to go on a racist tirade.

He called Somali Minnesotans garbage. He called them criminals. He called them worthless.

“They contribute nothing,” said Trump, a convicted criminal who was born into wealth because his immigrant grandfather had the pluck to dodge the draft, come to America and open a brothel.

Trump has been targeting Minnesota Somalis for months. There’s a reason white-collar Somali crime seems to be the only issue the Minnesota GOP is talking about in the upcoming gubernatorial election against favored Trump punching bag Gov. Tim Walz. Republicans in the U.S. House have launched investigations into white-collar Somali crime. A conga line of federal agencies is investigating white-collar Somali crime.

But white-collar crime isn’t scary. Trump committed white-collar crime — plus that civil conviction for sexual abuse — and got reelected anyway. So when he describes Minnesota Somalis, they turn into “roving gangs” rampaging across the countryside while Minnesotans cower fearfully in their homes.

Minnesotans are not cowering in their homes. Minnesotans are outside, shoveling.

Trump once described the White House as “a real dump,” so his trash talk might not be the stinging insult he thinks it is. But he meant that word to hurt, to demean, to stir up hatred against an entire people.

He has targeted Minnesota Somalis with threats of ICE raids and funding cuts, and federal investigations aimed to link the word “Somali” with the word “terrorist.” When an alleged killer from a different nation opened fire on National Guard troops a thousand miles away, Trump responded by threatening to revoke the temporary protected status “for Somalis in Minnesota.”

Somali Minnesotans are our neighbors, teachers, chefs, entrepreneurs, firefighters, police officers, artists, journalists, students, accountants, caregivers and lawmakers. Somalis are Minnesota.

The only thing Minnesota fears is what Trump plans to do to them — and to us.

Minnesota has some experience with politicians who try to dehumanize immigrants.

Those German immigrants.

Between 1917 and 1918, as America entered World War I, Gov. J. A. A. Burnquist, backed by the Legislature, stirred up public paranoia against the state’s largest ethnic group. The Minnesota Historical Society preserves the memory of the German American shopkeepers boycotted because of their names, the people hounded out of jobs, the churches and schools harassed for preaching and teaching in a foreign language.

Friedrich Trump, the president’s German-born grandfather, died before the war ended.

When the next world war rolled around, Freidrich’s son and grandson told anyone who asked — or read “The Art of the Deal” — that the Trumps were Swedish.

A president who takes no pride in his own ethnic heritage may struggle to understand those of us who do. My grandparents immigrated from Ireland, and I never shut up about it.

Somali Minnesotans are just Minnesotans.

If Trump wants to come after them, he’s going to have to go through us.