Ilhan Omar Is the Right Kind of American. Trump Is the Wrong Kind.

The president’s crusade against the Minnesota congresswoman, and Somali Americans in general, is certainly racist. And it’s arguably more than that.

On October 15, 1969, Somali President Abdurashid Ali Shermarke was slain by an assassin’s bullet. Unrest had prevailed in the country ever since … well, in many ways, ever since independence was won in 1960, but particularly over the previous couple years. Then as now, Somalia didn’t register much in most Americans’ minds, but the editors of The New York Times judged the event newsworthy enough that it made the front page, with a report noting the imposition of a curfew in “Mogadiscio,” as the capital was then styled by the paper of record.

Six days later, a military junta took control of the country under the leadership of Mohammed Siad Barre. He was a socialist, and he imposed Marxist-Leninist government, aligning with the Soviet Union. But over time, his relationship with Moscow soured. The Soviets frowned upon Somalia’s 1977 invasion of Ethiopia and switched allegiances. According to a 1982 New York Times op-ed by the respected comparative political scientist David D. Laitin, Washington began to take an interest in Siad Barre. Jimmy Carter did so tentatively; but “President Reagan, abandoning caution, gave Mr. Siad Barre a warm welcome in Washington” that March, Laitin wrote. Little countries like Somalia at the time were just pieces on a Cold War chessboard on which the Reagan administration moved around its pawns with particular aggression.

By the late 1980s, discontent with Siad Barre was such that rebel groups began engaging government forces; a civil war erupted. By the early 1990s, Somalia was a failed state. Siad Barre went into exile. Governments couldn’t patch the nation together. And around that time, Somalis began to flee to Kenya—hundreds of thousands of them, into refugee camps. The largest, Dadaab, is still home to some 400,000 Somali refugees, 35 years later.

Why should all this matter to you right now? Because one of those refugees, Nur Omar Mohammed, took his children to........

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