Trump Ilhan Omar remarks Oval Office
What Trump said
The remarks came as Trump took questions at the Resolute desk during Tuesday's White House event launching WHIP, a whistleblower program that pays members of the public for tips about government fraud. The exchange captured on camera begins mid-answer — the reporter's question is not heard in the widely shared clip — with the president already talking about Omar and the possibility that she could be prosecuted.
"She could also go to jail," Trump said. "You know, they keep talking about deportation. No, she could go to jail. This is just my opinion."
He then turned to Omar herself. "I think she's a sick, a very dishonest person, who hates our country," Trump said. "And she comes from a country that is essentially not even a country, Somalia. It's a real shithouse, OK? It's got no government. It's got no police. It's got no nothing. All they do is have people running around shooting each other."
"Then she comes over here, and other people — but largely, it's become about her," he continued. "Then she comes over here and she wants to tell us how to run America, how to run the United States of America. And she'll say, 'Oh, I have constitutional rights.' We all have constitutional rights. She's a disgrace to our country."
Trump returned to Omar minutes later, questioning how she keeps winning office. "You know, it's amazing that she can get elected, but Somalians vote for her," he said. "And most of them shouldn't be here. Do you know they have like a 98% unemployment rate? They don't work. 98%. It's a disgrace."
"And they've ruined a great state," he added. "I remember Minnesota in the old days. I mean, it was a great state. The lakes, everything was so beautiful. They're destroying it."
The president closed the passage with an endorsement of sorts for the candidate Republicans hope will win Minnesota's governorship. "I only hope a Republican woman who happens to be very respected by everybody gets in," he said. "I hope that's going to happen. I hope they treat her fairly. But I think she's a very dishonest person." Journalist Aaron Parnas, who covered the event, reported that the "Republican woman" was an apparent reference to Lisa Demuth, the Republican candidate for Minnesota governor, who is running against Democrat Amy Klobuchar.
A clip of the remarks posted by Rapid Response 47, the White House's own rapid-response account on X, had been viewed more than 300,000 times within roughly four hours, according to the post's public counter. The New York Post and Al Jazeera were among the outlets that reported the remarks on Tuesday, and the language was consistent across accounts of the event.
The event behind the remarks
The setting matters. Trump was not at a rally but at an official signing ceremony for WHIP, a Justice Department program — funded at $25 million, according to Parnas's reporting — that pays tipsters 1% of fraud funds recovered on their information, via the government's fraud.gov portal. Vice President JD Vance, Dr. Mehmet Oz and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson flanked the president, and Trump handed a $10,000 check to Nick Shirley, a conservative content creator whose videos about alleged daycare fraud in Minnesota helped ignite the state's fraud debate. Signal Post News covered the launch in full in Trump, Vance Launch WHIP Fraud Whistleblower Program.
According to the New York Post's account of the same event, Trump also declared Omar and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz "100% guilty" of facilitating benefit fraud in Minnesota — an accusation, not a finding; neither has been charged with any fraud offence. "The governor is 100% guilty," the Post quoted Trump as saying. "He's a fraud. He's a thief. He's a crook." Walz is not seeking re-election and is not on November's ballot; the Post also reported that Trump referred to Omar as "that little congresswoman" and said of the alleged fraud, "She knew, they all knew."
Minnesota's fraud scandals are real and bipartisan in their fallout: federal prosecutors have charged dozens of defendants in the Feeding Our Future case and related schemes that allegedly stole hundreds of millions of dollars from child-nutrition and housing programs, and the state has become the centre of a national argument about oversight of public benefits. What has never been established — by any charge, court filing or official finding made public — is personal wrongdoing by Omar. That distinction runs through everything that follows.
The investigation in the background
Tuesday's language landed eight days after federal agents searched Omar's Washington home. Reuters reported on October 12 that Homeland Security Investigations agents conducted a pre-dawn search of the congresswoman's D.C. residence at about 6 a.m. under a judicially authorised warrant, and that the Justice Department confirmed an "ongoing federal criminal investigation" while declining to describe its focus. According to the Wall Street Journal, agents seized her phone, passport, computers and notebooks, and the warrant reportedly listed conspiracy, false statements and immigration fraud among its subjects. The New York Times reported that roughly a dozen people, including relatives, received subpoenas, and Fox News reported that her sister, Sahra Noor, spoke voluntarily with investigators.
At the centre of the reporting is a question about paperwork from a quarter-century ago. The Journal reported that investigators are examining whether Omar's age was altered to present her as 17 rather than 18 when her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, naturalised in 2000 — a distinction that could matter to how her own citizenship derived from his. The Post reported on Tuesday that her birthdate was changed by one year in public records after her 2018 election, a claim Omar's side has not confirmed. Signal Post News reported Monday on claims that investigators had searched her trash for DNA before the home search; those claims, first carried by the American Tribune, remain unverified, and the underlying family allegations are ones Omar has repeatedly denied for years. Our explainer, Trump Administration's Ilhan Omar Citizenship Investigation Explained, sets out what is known and what is not, and our earlier report has the full account of the search of Omar's home.
Border adviser Tom Homan has said that if allegations were proven, consequences could extend to denaturalisation — the stripping of citizenship — and deportation. Omar, who arrived in the United States in 1995 after her family fled Somalia's civil war and spent years in a Kenyan refugee camp, became a U.S. citizen in 2000. No charges against her have been announced, and no evidence against her has been made public by investigators.
Omar's response
As of publication on Tuesday afternoon, Omar had not publicly responded to the Oval Office remarks themselves, and Fox News reported she had not answered its requests for comment. Her standing response to the investigation, posted on X hours after the October 12 search, was unequivocal.
"This raid by Trump's DHS is an outrageous abuse of power and an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies," she wrote. "For a decade, Donald Trump has relentlessly targeted Congresswoman Ilhan Omar with inflammatory rhetoric, repeatedly putting a target on her back. The Congresswoman has done nothing wrong. No president should be able to use the power of the federal government to intimidate his political enemies."
In a further post last week she added: "For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced." And on Thursday: "Trump and his administration have been after me since I arrived in Congress. I have always stood up to him and that will never change."
Democratic leaders reacted to the search — and, by extension, to the campaign around it — in a joint statement from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and the Democratic leadership team on October 12, calling it "deeply disturbing." "For years, Donald Trump and far-right extremists have relentlessly targeted Congresswoman Omar with vile personal attacks and baseless accusations," they said, noting that federal agents had "descended upon the home of a duly elected Member of Congress" less than 30 days before the midterm elections.
Republicans, for their part, have largely lined up behind the investigation. Vice President Vance has insisted the probe is not political: "We really want to let the law, the facts drive this." Rep. Randy Fine of Florida went far further after the search, writing: "President Trump is working hard to reunite Omar with her countrymen in Somalia!" and "She should be denaturalized and deported. They should all go home." No Republican in Congress has publicly criticised the president's Tuesday remarks.
Checking the claims
Two of Tuesday's factual claims do not hold up against available data. The "98% unemployment" figure for Somali immigrants has no basis in any official statistic: no federal dataset supports it, and employment reporting based on the Census Bureau's American Community Survey puts Somali-American labour-force participation at roughly four in five adults — a world away from the president's number. The figure should be treated as rhetoric, not data.
The description of Somalia as "not even a country" with "no government" is likewise a characterisation rather than a fact: Somalia is a United Nations member state with an internationally recognised federal government in Mogadishu — a fragile one, fighting an insurgency by al-Shabaab, but a state with which the United States maintains diplomatic relations and security cooperation. And one detail in early coverage of Tuesday's event is simply wrong: the Post described Omar as a "seven-term" congresswoman. She was first elected in 2018 and, per Reuters, is seeking a fifth term this November — a useful reminder of how fast errors propagate when remarks move this quickly.
A decade of history
Trump's fixation on Omar predates her first election to Congress. She arrived in the United States as a 12-year-old refugee in 1995, was elected to the Minnesota House in 2016 and to Congress in 2018, becoming one of the first two Muslim women and the first Somali American in the House. In July 2019, Trump tweeted that Omar and three other progressive congresswomen should "go back" to the countries they came from — despite three of the four being born in the United States and Omar being a naturalised citizen — and a rally crowd days later chanted "send her back." The House voted to condemn those remarks as racist.
The feud has resumed in every Congress since, over everything from foreign policy to immigration enforcement. What is different now is the machinery behind the words: an open federal criminal investigation, a search of her home, subpoenas for her relatives and a president publicly musing — in his own words, offering "just my opinion" — that she "could go to jail." Presidential commentary on pending investigations has historically been constrained by fear of prejudicing prosecutions; that constraint has been eroding for years, and Tuesday's remarks were among the most direct tests of it yet.
Why it matters
Fourteen days before a midterm election, the president attacked a sitting member of Congress who is on the ballot, questioned whether hundreds of thousands of her constituents "should be here," and tied her fate to a criminal probe run by his own Justice Department. Minnesota's Somali community — the largest in the United States, centred in Minneapolis — is both a voting bloc that has reliably backed Omar and a community already under strain from the fraud investigations and immigration enforcement of the past year. Trump's praise for Demuth also folds the exchange into the governor's race, where Klobuchar, a former presidential candidate and sitting senator, is the Democratic nominee.
For Omar, the near-term stakes are legal as much as political: denaturalisation is rare, slow and litigated in federal court, and it would require the government to prove its case about events from 2000 by clear and convincing evidence. Nothing in the public record so far shows that case has been made — or even formally opened against her, beyond the investigation the Justice Department has confirmed exists.
What happens next
The investigation continues without a public timetable; the Justice Department has not announced charges against Omar or commented on Tuesday's remarks. Omar's office is expected to respond to the president's latest comments, and any statement will be added to this story. Minnesota voters decide her fifth-term bid — and the Klobuchar–Demuth governor's race — on November 3. And the WHIP program Trump was ostensibly there to launch begins its work under a cloud of its own: a whistleblower scheme whose launch event doubled as a presidential attack on the most prominent Somali American in public life.
Sources
Primary footage: the White House event feed, October 20, 2026 (owner-supplied recording; transcript verified against it). New York Post, October 20 · Reuters, October 12 · Fox News, October 20 · ABC News (Associated Press wire), October 12 · Wall Street Journal and New York Times reporting on the search and subpoenas · Rep. Omar's statements on X (@IlhanMN) · House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries' office, October 12 · Aaron Parnas, Substack. Signal Post News reporting: WHIP launch, the October 12 home search, and the citizenship-probe explainer linked above.
Reporting note: Signal Post News reports both sides of this story. The investigation of Rep. Omar consists of reported claims by federal authorities and news organisations; she has not been charged with any offence and denies wrongdoing. The president's characterisations are quoted and attributed to him. This story will be updated with Rep. Omar's response to Tuesday's remarks when she gives one.