One noontime a few weeks ago, I went to lunch with a colleague from the University of Minnesota. We strolled around the corner from our offices to a mutually favorite spot, the Afro Deli, for a hybrid meal of gyro, samosas, falafel, and chai. This Afro Deli location was part of a local chain that had been founded by an immigrant from Djibouti who won a national award as small-business owner of the year. Half of the lunchtime crowd hailed from the university campus, half from the surrounding neighborhood of Cedar-Riverside, whose eponymous high-rise apartment complex is the epicenter of the Twin Cities’ Somali community of about 65,000.

To hear our president tell it, however, I had put my very life in danger by dining with a friend in an African restaurant in a Somali neighborhood. Though Donald Trump visibly dozed off several times during a Cabinet meeting on December 2, the reliable stimulant of nativism stirred him awake long enough to denounce Minnesota’s Somalis as “garbage.” In a Truth Social posting about two weeks earlier, Trump had declared that “Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State.”

It is hardly surprising that Trump reviled the Somalis: African, Muslim, and dark-skinned, they provide a veritable trifecta for presidential bigotry. And with his feral genius for sniffing out the wedgiest of issues, one might say in the manner of a piggy rooting for truffles, Trump levied his broadside in the aftermath of a genuine scandal, in which a largely Somali nongovernmental organization in Minnesota called Feeding Our Future defrauded the federal government of $250 million meant for providing meals during the pandemic lockdowns.

Of course, Trump neglected to mention that it was a self-described “white lady” born and bred in Minnesota who led the NGO and the scheme. The very day before the president’s rant against Somalis, the big fraud news in Minneapolis........

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