ILLNESS: When he came for the Somalis again...

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2025

...MS NOW stars kept their traps shut: Yesterday, there he went again! Just as he'd done the previous day, the sitting president—President Sanitized—came for the Somalis again.

He came for them for the second straight day! But if you're a person who watches MS NOW, you had to go to Mediaite to learn that he'd done this again. 

At Mediaite, Sarah Rumpf has reported what the president said during yesterday's second assault. She then stated her opinion of what he had said in a separate opinion column.

First she reported, then she opined. We include the headlines atop her news report about yesterday's encore performance:

Trump Rants About Ilhan Omar: ‘Should Be Thrown the Hell Out of Our Country,’ ‘Shouldn’t Even Be Allowed’ in Congress

President Donald Trump called for Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) to be thrown out of the country and said she and other Somali immigrants should not be allowed to be in Congress.

The president was responding to a reporter’s question about his comments Tuesday that he did not want any more Somalis moving to the U.S. and specifically attacking Omar, calling her “garbage” and “a terrible person.” Trump’s comments were widely viewed as racist and sharply criticized.

On Wednesday, Trump took questions from reporters in the Oval Office, and one reporter asked about his comments about Somali immigrants.

Rumph offered a transcript (and videotape) of Trump's remarks on this second day. Among other things, he said that Rep. Omar "shouldn’t be allowed to be a congresswoman" and that she "should be thrown the hell out of our country."

Also, "the Somalians should be out of here," he said. "They have destroyed our country," he crazily said, and so on from there.

So it went, on the second day, when the president came for this group. Later, Rumph offered this opinion column:

Opinion: Trump’s Hateful Oval Office Rant About Somali Immigrants Shines a Harsh Light on the Cowardice of His Cronies

President Donald Trump launched into a rant Wednesday attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and other Somali immigrants, saying they should be “thrown the hell out of our country” and not allowed to serve in Congress, an unhinged moment that revealed not just the president’s animosity towards a group of Americans, but the cowardice and complicity of the cronies gathered around him from Congress and his cabinet.

On Tuesday, Trump attacked Omar as “garbage” and “a terrible person,” and expanded his vitriol to all Somali immigrants, declaring “I don’t want them in our country” because “they contribute nothing.” His comments were—rightfully—loudly criticized as racist.

Trump aggressively defended his comments during a Q&A session with reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday.

Rumph's column continues from there. For the record, Trump didn't use the word "garbage" this day. It's possible that somebody clued him.

At any rate, Rumph's opinion column continues from there. As she ended, she went where we ourselves had gone when we watched the first day of these broadsides:

(from Rumph's opinion column)
If we don’t want this chapter of American history to be recorded as “First they came for the Somalis…” then it is incumbent upon those around the president, who have influence in this administration and in Congress, to speak up

UPDATE: Retired NY Daily News reporter Helen Kennedy posted a list on her Bluesky account of the people who attended the Oval Office presser with Trump. “I think it should be noted who stood there,” she wrote.

Rumph savaged the cronies who stood behind Trump on this second day. They said and did nothing as he "came for the Somalis" again.

That said, those cronies weren't the only people who said nothing about these two days—the two days during which, to our ear, the president has finally seemed to identify his target population of choice.

Another group has said and done nothing for two days and two nights. As best we can tell, the stars of MS NOW have also maintained their silence, presumably in response to a directive from the corporate suites.

Who has stayed silent in the past two days? We refer to Scarborough and O'Donnell and Hayes and Psaki and, as best we can tell, to everyone else on the Blue America cable news roster. 

As we noted yesterday, we were shocked on Wednesday morning when the Morning Joe gang said nothing about what the president said on Tuesday afternoon. As we noted, the New York Times was reporting the president's "shocking" conduct at the very top of its web site, but the Morning Joe gang stayed silent all through its opening hour.

What were they choosing to disregard? According to that Times report, here's what the president had said in Tuesday's diatribe:

Trump Calls Somalis ‘Garbage’ He Doesn’t Want in the Country

President Trump unleashed a xenophobic tirade against Somali immigrants on Tuesday, calling them “garbage” he does not want in the United States in an outburst that captured the raw nativism that has animated his approach to immigration.

Even for Mr. Trump—who has a long history of insulting Black people, particularly those from African countries—his outburst was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry. And it comes as he started a new ICE operation targeting Somalis in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region.

“These are people that do nothing but complain,” Mr. Trump said at the tail end of a cabinet meeting at the White House, during which he sometimes appeared to be fighting sleep. But when the subject turned to immigration, Mr. Trump made a point of lashing out.

“When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it,” Mr. Trump added as Vice President JD Vance banged the table in encouragement.

He said Somalia “stinks and we don’t want them in our country.” He described Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, who came to the United States from Somalia as a refugee and became a citizen 25 years ago, as “garbage.”

“We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Mr. Trump said. “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’”

Rep. Omar is garbage, and her friends are too. The president had continued from there. Yesterday morning, at the top of its website's front page, the New York Times called his behavior "shocking."

That's what the president said on Tuesday afternoon. Yesterday, he continued this onslaught, but we can find no instant sign that two straight days of this behavior has been mentioned on MS NOW programs at all.

On Morning Joe? On The Last Word? On All In? On The Briefing with Jen Psaki? We can find no sign that two days of this behavior has even been mentioned on these programs. 

CORRECTION: Last night, Psaki aired the videotape of Trump's second-day presentation fairly late in her 9 o'clock hour

Yesterday, we criticized Scarborough for his silence. He was silent again this morning, leading us to assume that the orders came from the corporate suites above.

We stand with Sarah Rumpf's flash reaction to this remarkable matter. When we happened to watch the president in real time on Tuesday afternoon, it seemed to us that he was finally naming the population he wanted to target in the ultimate irresponsible way. 

As to why he would do such a thing, we now confess to this:

We have assumed, for some time, that this president has been, all along, in the grip of a type of "illness."

As we noted yesterday, t's an "illness" of the second kind. That particular use of the word is apparently going out of favor when it comes to situations like this.

As opposed to a basic physical illness, it's the kind of illness which is conceptually complex and confusing. 

The president's niece is a doctorate-wielding clinical therapist. As we've noted many times, her assessment of her adult uncle's "psychopathologies" runs exactly like this:

Prologue

[...]

None of the Trump siblings emerged unscathed from my grandfather’s sociopathy and my grandmother’s illnesses, both physical and psychological, but my uncle Donald and my father, Freddy, suffered more than the rest. In order to get a complete picture of Donald, his psychopathologies, and the meaning of his dysfunctional behavior, we need a thorough family history.

In the last three years, I’ve watched as countless pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have kept missing the mark, using phrases such as “malignant narcissism” and “narcissistic personality disorder” in an attempt to make sense of Donald’s often bizarre and self-defeating behavior. I have no problem calling Donald a [clinically diagnosable] narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label gets us only so far.

[...]

Does Donald have other symptoms we aren’t aware of? Are there other disorders that might have as much or more explanatory power? Maybe. A case could be made that he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy but can also refer to chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others...

The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for.

So the niece assessed. We've long assumed something else:

According to the leading authorities, the condition colloquially known as "sociopathy" can be at least partly inherited. It can be passed along in the genes to the unsuspecting child. 

With that tragic fact in mind, we've long advised you to "pity the child" in the case of this particular human tragedy. Also, according to the leading authorities, something like five percent of adult men are diagnosable for this "personality disorder." 

In essence, a wire is hanging loose in some of our imperfect human brains. People so afflicted don't react to situations in the (admittedly limited) way the rest of us humans may do. 

Their physiology may limit their reactions and their moral understanding. There but for the grace of God go the rest of us limited people.

Our journalists don't have the slightest idea how to talk about this. In part for that reason, they've agreed that this president's possible or apparent mental state must never be discussed or assessed, not even by medical specialists.

Somehow, this seems to have bled over into the silence of the past two days—the silence from the millionaire "cable news" hosts we Blues have been told we should trust.

Just a guess! Somewhere up in the corporate suites, some executive seems to have made a decision about what the president did. For whatever reason, that person decided that viewers of MS NOW shouldn't be told about the onslaught the president has aimed at this "garbage" of the upper Midwest.

In this follow-up news report, the New York Times has reported the fear within Minnesota's Somali population in the wake of Tuesday's initial outburst. Quoting from the report:

A widespread sense of anxiety and foreboding was palpable in Minnesota, home to the largest diaspora of Somalis in the world, a day after President Trump in the Oval Office referred to Somalis as “garbage” amid his administration’s new crackdown on East African immigrants in the state who may be subject to deportation.

“What is happening now goes far beyond immigration enforcement,” said Abdiqani A. Jabane, a Somali American immigration lawyer in Minneapolis. “It is creating an atmosphere of xenophobia, where an entire community feels targeted and unsafe.”

Yesterday, the president did it again. He came for the Somalis again—but if you get your news from MS NOW, you haven't been told about this.

The president came for the Somalis? Was Rumph over-reacting when she framed it that way?

Was the scribe out over her skis? We can't really say that she was!

This afternoon: Good God! What viewers were told by The Five