Trump Nemesis Strolls to Victory Despite Federal Probe
More than three-quarters of voters in Ilhan Omar’s district just gave Donald Trump the one-finger salute.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
A Democratic congresswoman loathed by President Donald Trump just secured an astonishing midterm victory despite facing investigation by his administration.
Rep. Ilhan Omar held onto Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District on Tuesday by 76.48 percent of the vote and with a 60.3 percent lead over her Republican challenger John Nagel, according to provisional results from the Minnesota secretary of state.
That’s her best showing since she first entered the House in 2018 and the largest margin by which she has ever won her seat.
Trump's dismal job approval has cost his party control of the House and Senate.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
The results are a fierce rebuke to the 80-year-old president’s attacks on both the Somali-born progressive Democrat and Minnesota’s wider Somali community, which makes up roughly 2 percent of the state’s population.
Trump has repeatedly called for Omar to “go home” while savaging Somali-Minnesotans as “garbage” over historic cases of welfare fraud in the Midwestern state.
Omar's victory forms part of a blue tsunami that promises to hobble the remainder of Trump's second term.
Mike Segar/REUTERS
His officials exaggerated the scale of those scandals to justify violent immigration raids in January that claimed the lives of two U.S. citizens in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.
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The Trump administration’s pressure on Omar intensified last month when the Department of Homeland Security raided her D.C. home as part of an investigation into immigration paperwork filed by her father when her family first arrived in the U.S. as refugees in the 1990s.
Omar became a U.S. citizen in 2000. She has dismissed the probe as an “outrageous abuse of power” and an “unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.”
Nagel, a former Minnesota State Patrol trooper, towed the Republican Party line in his campaign against the popular Democratic congresswoman, saying he would focus on strengthening protections against welfare fraud and bolstering border security.
That platform secured him 16.23 percent of the vote. The Daily Beast has contacted his campaign and the White House for comment on this story.
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