Trump on Ilhan Omar in South Carolina: “Send her back. Who the hell wants her?”

Donald Trump went to Rock Hill, South Carolina, to sell a Senate candidate and spent a stretch of the afternoon on a congresswoman from Minnesota. Ilhan Omar, he said, used a “fake name.” That is his claim, and he offered nothing else for it.

Then the travel brochure. Somalia, per Trump, is “a lovely, lovely country” where “they have no government” and “all they have is crime.” Its people, he said, “ripped off Minnesota for billions of dollars.” His policy proposal: “send her back.” His follow-up question: “Who the hell wants her?” Omar is a sitting member of Congress and a US citizen. The crowd did not ask for a footnote, so here it is anyway.

A minute later he went back for seconds. “She comes from this horrible, horrible place. It’s a shithouse country.” He then retold a private immigration meeting with Democrats, and the line from it, as he tells it: “How come we always take people from shithouse countries?” They told the press, he complained, and “that was the end of that.” His review of the leak: “So much for silence. But it’s true.”

He closed on the Constitution. Omar, he said, “wants to tell us how to run the United States of America.” His answer: “I don’t think so.” Then: “My Constitution.” It was not clear whose copy he meant.