President Donald Trump, like all bullies, is also a coward, so it isn’t surprising that during a State of the Union address where he boasted and raged for hours, one word was notably missing: Minneapolis.
You’d think that since Operation Metro Surge—the federal immigration operation that left two Americans dead in the city—was such a big deal, such a heroic endeavor, that it would have played a central role in Trump’s address, but nope, nary a mention.
Yes, Trump did take aim at Minnesota more broadly, blaming Somalis and Somali-Americans for his fever dreams of massive fraud, because hey, you gotta play the hits, right?
In case you’re keeping score at home, Trump says the supposed fraud in Minnesota is now up to $19 billion or perhaps more. However, the state’s most recent two-year budget was $66 billion. If, just for simplicity’s sake, we peg the state’s yearly budget at half that ($33 billion), then Trump is claiming that the fraud swallowed the equivalent of over one-half of the state’s entire yearly budget.
Trump’s numbers are fictional, of course. For example, the federal government gives Minnesota about $467 million annually for low-income child care subsidies, which are ostensibly the locus of all this fraud.
President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 24.
Yet, even if the so-called fraud was all real, the administration’s antics during Operation Metro Surge were appalling enough that Minnesota’s top fraud prosecutor at the state’s U.S. attorney’s office, Joe Thompson, quit in disgust.
While Trump was busy making up numbers and trashing the state’s Somali community, he somehow didn’t think to tout whatever made-up numbers Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had from how the immigration operation made Minneapolis so super safe.
Perhaps he gave it a miss because DHS had to admit that its whole “worst of the worst” website was filled with errors about the charges immigrants faced?
Or maybe it was because many of the terrible worst-of-the-worsts that Minneapolis and Minnesota were supposedly harboring were … already incarcerated in the state. Minnesota then turned them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the end of their time served, no street abductions needed.
But why didn’t Trump brag about arresting Black journalists for the crime of reporting the news? His administration worked hard to get an indictment of reporter Don Lemon. Why not shout it from the rafters during the State of the Union?
Or perhaps Trump could have boasted about how pregnant people in the Twin Cities metro area were so scared they would be kidnapped by federal agents that many stopped going to prenatal visits? Why didn’t Trump want to highlight that amazing achievement?
And what, no boasts about executing dangerous antifa terrorists like Alex Pretti and Renee Good?
Surely, Trump should have highlighted ICE’s brave abduction of multiple kids, including five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, from a single elementary school. Noem stood strongly behind the nobility of kidnapping children, so why can’t Trump? Isn’t this worth claiming as one of your first year’s biggest accomplishments?
Although Trump’s brain is nothing but Adderall and spiders by now, even he knows that ICE’s brutalization of Minneapolis did not play nearly as well as he had hoped, so he kept his mouth shut.
What a wuss.
