Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar decried President Trump’s national campaign rallies as “Klan rallies.”
Omar, who has often been a target of Trump’s ire during his rallies, made the quip in an interview with the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart on Monday.
During the interview, the two discussed the president’s repeated attacks against the freshman congresswoman from Minnesota, who decisively won her bid for a second term despite outsiders pouring money into her challenger’s war chest. Capehart asked her what it has been like as Trump “directly attack[ed] you, by name, personally.”
“On a personal level, I have gotten accustomed to standing up to bullies in my life, and so on a personal level, it hasn’t really impacted me besides having my children be exposed to it,” she said. “And you know, for the last two months of this election cycle, waking up every single morning to text messages from my siblings asking if I was safe because he chose to speak about me at every single rally, didn’t really matter where he was, sometimes multiple times in a day, as he held his Klan rallies throughout the country.”
Jason Miller, an adviser for the Trump campaign, responded to Omar’s comments by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, your 2020 Democratic Party.”
Ladies and gentlemen, your 2020 Democratic Party:
“Ilhan Omar Calls President Trump’s Campaign Rallies ‘Klan Rallies'”https://t.co/rm91vlGAnY
— Jason Miller (@JasonMillerinDC) November 16, 2020
Steve Guest, the Republican National Committee’s rapid response director, called the comments “UNHINGED” on Twitter.
Omar was one of the first two Muslim women to be elected into the House of Representatives in 2018 and has faced constant attacks from the president and Republicans during her tenure. She was born in Somalia and immigrated as a refugee during her childhood, which has been a line of attack from the president. Trump has suggested she go back to her home country, which she was forced to flee amid the country’s civil war, if she was that unhappy in the United States.
During a September rally in Pennsylvania, the president said to the crowd, “How about Omar of Minnesota? We’re going to win the state of Minnesota because of her, they say. She’s telling us how to run our country. How did you do where you came from? How’s your country doing?”
Omar tweeted back, “Firstly, this is my country & I am a member of the House that impeached you. Secondly, I fled a civil war when I was 8. An 8-year-old doesn’t run a country even though you run our country like one.”
Trump held dozens of rallies in the lead-up to the presidential election in cities all across the country. He routinely hit the same topics — the “radical Left” and its apparent push toward socialism, claims that the Obama administration spied on his campaign, and others — during his rallies.
