By: Mohammed Hassen Mohamed (Xareed)
Populist Engineering and the Invention of the “Dangerous Outsider”
The public remarks directed toward Somalis during the Trump era did not arise from personal temperament alone, nor can they be dismissed as isolated rhetorical excesses. They represented the surface expression of a deeper political strategy embedded within populist nationalism, racialized immigration discourse, electoral manipulation, and the securitization of identity. To understand why Somalis became a recurring symbolic target, emotional reaction must be set aside in favor of structural political analysis. What emerges is not randomness but pattern—an architecture of calculated power that converts identity into political weaponry while simultaneously erasing the civilizational depth of those being targeted.
At the core of this political strategy lies a rigid form of right-wing populism that divides society into an imagined moral community of “real people” and a manufactured class of “dangerous outsiders.” Within this worldview, immigrants cease to be human beings shaped by history, trauma, labor, and aspiration. They become instruments through which fear can be mobilized and loyalty extracted. Somalis, positioned at the intersection of Blackness, Muslim identity, refugee experience, and urban visibility, were easily absorbed into this pre-constructed stereotype of the threatening outsider. This reflects a classic mechanism identified in Social Identity Theory and the politics of othering, whereby leaders consolidate internal loyalty not by cultivating shared civic values but by inventing a hostile external figure. Under such logic, Somalis were not attacked because of who they are as a people, but because the political framework in which the attacks occurred demanded a visible and emotionally charged enemy.
Fear as a Political Technology in the Electoral Marketplace
Fear operates in modern electoral politics as a form of political technology. It mobilizes more rapidly than reasoned argument, simplifies complexity into slogans, and converts diffuse anxiety into partisan loyalty. Political psychology consistently demonstrates that frightened populations display heightened receptivity to authoritarian messaging. By repeatedly associating Somalis with terrorism, welfare abuse, and criminality—despite overwhelming empirical evidence contradicting such associations—the rhetoric activated cognitive shortcuts among low-information segments of the electorate. These shortcuts do not engage analysis but move directly to instinct. The result was not accidental prejudice born of ignorance but the deliberate engineering of political fear as an electoral instrument.
Islamophobia and the Securitization of Religious Identity
Because Somalis are overwhelmingly Muslim, this discourse cannot be separated from the broader structure of post-9/11 Islamophobia in American political culture. The War on Terror, permanent national security anxiety, and sensationalist media framing created a cultural environment in which religious identity could be transmuted into a security threat. Through public debates, mass rallies, and restrictive immigration policies—particularly travel bans and refugee limitations—this fear was amplified through what security scholars define as securitization: the conversion of social identity into an existential danger in order to justify extraordinary political measures. In this atmosphere, Somalis ceased to function as a people within the political imagination and instead became stand-ins for a wider manufactured fear of Islam itself.
Outrage as Currency in the Media Economy
This process was magnified by a media economy that converts outrage into profit. In the algorithm-driven attention marketplace, insult produces virality, controversy guarantees coverage, and conflict displaces substantive policy. News networks across ideological lines repeatedly amplified inflammatory language because it generated audience engagement and advertising revenue. Within this spectacle-driven system, Somalis became collateral damage in a marketplace where attention is currency and outrage is its most profitable commodity.
Demographic Anxiety and the Politics of Racial Threat Perception
The rhetoric also intersected with much older American anxieties concerning race, demographic change, and the perceived erosion of historical white political dominance. Somali communities symbolize African migration, visible Islam, and rapid urban demographic transformation, particularly in regions like Minnesota. For extreme nationalist audiences, this combination produces what scholars describe as racial threat perception—the belief that historical privilege is slipping away and must be politically defended. This pattern mirrors earlier moral panics in U.S. history against Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century, Jewish refugees in the early twentieth century, and Latino migrants in the late twentieth. Each wave, in its time, was described through nearly identical language of fear, degeneration, and national ruin.
Scapegoating as a Strategy of Political Survival
Scapegoating also functions as a classic strategy of political survival. During moments of acute pressure—legal exposure, economic instability, pandemic crisis, or foreign policy failure—the rhetorical focus predictably pivoted back toward immigrants. This reflects a mechanism long identified in political theory, which warns that mass movements sustain themselves not through truth, but through the continuous manufacture of emotional loyalty. Somalis, as a relatively small and politically vulnerable minority, became an especially convenient pressure point through which public anger could be redirected away from governance failures.
Psychopolitical Dimensions of Collective Humiliation
From the perspective of clinical political psychology, this rhetorical style closely aligns with what scholars describe as narcissistic populist leadership, characterized by grandiosity, low empathy, high verbal aggression, and domination through humiliation. In such a personality structure, collective insult ceases to be a mere political tactic and becomes a mechanism of psychological control. Human dignity becomes expendable in the performance of engineered strength.
Restoring the Civilizational Weight of Somali History
What makes the collective targeting of Somalis particularly unjust is that it erases one of Africa’s oldest and most resilient civilizations. Historically, Somali lands were not zones of dependency but hubs of Indian Ocean and Red Sea commerce. Somali merchants connected Africa, Arabia, and Asia through gold, incense, spices, and livestock. Port cities such as Mogadishu, Zeila, and Berbera ranked among the most prosperous commercial centers of the Muslim world. Somali society also produced one of the richest oral poetic traditions on the African continent, a sophisticated customary legal system known as xeer, and deeply rooted ethical codes of hospitality, honor, restraint, and dignity. To collapse such a people into caricatures of criminality or dependency is not analysis—it is civilizational distortion.
Islam as Moral Architecture, Not Security Threat
Islam, in this civilizational formation, is not an ornamental layer of identity. It is its moral spine. Through Islamic tradition, Somali society historically elevated justice, learning, family responsibility, the protection of the weak, and ethical commerce. Mosques, scholars, judges, and teachers structured social order long before the arrival of modern state institutions. To securitize this religion is therefore to weaponize the very framework that historically restrained tyranny and organized collective moral life.
The Immigrant Paradox and Status-Ladder Amnesia
The harsh anti-immigrant posture also contains a deep historical contradiction. The same political figure who benefitted directly from generational migration opportunities—through a German grandfather and a Scottish mother—rose socially, economically, and politically through the openness of the very system later vilified. While popular narratives sometimes exaggerate this lineage into claims unsupported by verifiable records, the established facts alone sufficiently expose the moral reversal: ascent through open doors followed by political profit through the demand that those doors be closed to others. This reflects what sociologists describe as status-ladder amnesia—the forgetting of vulnerability after the acquisition of power.
From Personal Rivalry to Collective Civilizational Targeting
A critical question must therefore be confronted directly. Are these attacks genuinely about the Somali people as a civilization, or are they merely an extension of personal political rivalry with Ilhan Omar? If the conflict were strictly political, it would have remained confined to policy disagreements, legislative positions, and ideological critique. Yet when an individual political rivalry expands into collective attacks against an entire people—their religion, culture, refugees, and historical memory—it signals that the real target has shifted. The contest is no longer over policy. It becomes a struggle over identity itself. That shift marks the transition from political dispute into collective civilizational hostility.
Distortion as a Method of Power
The rhetorical method involved operates through moral misdirection. It highlights the most negative image, suppresses the ordinary reality, and repeats distortion until falsehood becomes familiar. In Somali communities, this means silencing stories of doctors, educators, entrepreneurs, students, and civic contributors while amplifying only the most sensationalized imagery of dysfunction. The Somali people have long been recognized for resilience, commercial intelligence, poetic mastery, and adaptive genius, so much so that they were historically described as “the Irish of Africa” for their sharp linguistic ability and mobility. To suppress this reality and foreground only brokenness is not ignorance. It is distortion by design.
The Moral Cost of Spectacle Politics
The rhetorical campaign against Somalis was therefore not accidental. It was strategically engineered, ideologically structured, electorally calculated, media-amplified, and psychologically reinforced. Yet beyond campaign tactics and spectacle lies a deeper moral cost. A proud civilization was reduced to a slogan. A dignified people were transformed into instruments of fear. A faith that built ethical order was reframed as permanent suspicion. The deepest irony remains unshaken: a descendant of immigrants entered through open doors and then used power to argue that others should never be allowed to enter.
Civilization, Memory, and the Judgment of History
History does not judge nations by how loudly they proclaim greatness. It judges them by how they treat the vulnerable, the displaced, and the misrepresented. When any people are collectively dehumanized, the moral foundations of the entire system begin to fracture. And when civilization is sacrificed for applause, decay needs no encouragement—it requires only time.
Mohamed Hassan Mohamed (Xareed), an MBA graduate of distinguished merit, is a seasoned academic and lecturer whose expertise spans scientific economic management, business information systems, human development, and a range of interdisciplinary domains. His intellectual contributions—marked by a fusion of advanced scholarly inquiry and strategic analysis—primarily explore the intricate dynamics of geoeconomic competition and regional conflict across the Horn of Africa. He can be reached at:
Xareedmo45@gmail.com
Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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