Rep. Ilhan Omar pushes back on Trump criticism: ‘Unlike you, I can read’

Rep. Ilhan Omar, D‑Minn., fired back at for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump after he mocked her for cit­ing the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion and par­tic­i­pat­ing in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics.

In a Mon­day appear­ance on Fox News’ The Ingra­ham Angle, Trump sin­gled out Omar while crit­i­ciz­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty.

“I look at some­body that comes from Soma­lia, where they don’t have any­thing — they don’t have police, they don’t have mil­i­tary, they don’t have any­thing,” Trump said, refer­ring to Omar, who is the only mem­ber of Con­gress born in Soma­lia. “All they have is crime — and she comes in and tells us how to run our coun­try.”

He went on to mim­ic her sup­posed remarks, say­ing, “‘The Con­sti­tu­tion says this, the Con­sti­tu­tion says…’ The whole thing is crazy.”

Omar didn’t hold back in her response.
“Unlike you, I can read and that’s why I know what the Con­sti­tu­tion says,” she wrote in a post on X, shar­ing a clip from Trump’s inter­view.

Omar, who is serv­ing her fourth term in Con­gress, fled Somalia’s civ­il war as a child. She arrived in the U.S. as a refugee and became a cit­i­zen in 2000, at age 17.

Trump has repeat­ed­ly tar­get­ed Omar in the past, telling her to “go back” to Soma­lia — includ­ing in a Truth Social post ear­li­er this month.

In late Sep­tem­ber, he even joked in the Oval Office about send­ing her back, say­ing he had spo­ken with Somalia’s pres­i­dent: “I sug­gest­ed that maybe he’d like to take her back,” Trump said. “He said, ‘I don’t want her.’”

Omar, how­ev­er, has remained unboth­ered by such remarks.
“I have no wor­ry,” she told reporters last month. “I don’t know how they’d take away my cit­i­zen­ship and, like, deport me.”

She added, “But I don’t even know, like, why that’s such a scary threat. I’m not the 8‑year-old who escaped war any­more. I’m grown. My kids are grown. Like, I can go live wher­ev­er I want.”

In a light­heart­ed jab, the White House respond­ed to Trump’s com­ments on Mon­day by post­ing a pho­to of him smil­ing and wav­ing from a McDonald’s dri­ve-thru win­dow.