On Friday, CNN Law Enforcement correspondent Whitney Wild interviewed a Minneapolis man who said he and his neighbors "campaigned for" Trump. The man, Mohamed Ahmed, is a Somali-American who voted for Trump. Ergo, he should be happy that Trump won. Yet, he isn't.
Why?
Because Ahmed has discovered, as so many who voted for Trump have done, that the man he thought the best choice to be President is a racist. This dark-skinned immigrant is now gobsmacked to discover that Trump hates immigrants, does not care for Black people, and loathes Muslims. And, just to ice Ahmed's cake, Trump puts Somalis on the lowest rung of his racial ladder.
Trump made his thinking clear this week when he launched into a pair of vicious and racist rants against Somalia and Somali Americans. First at a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday and then during an Oval Office photo op on Wednesday. He called Somali immigrants "garbage" and said they should "go back to where they came."
"These aren't people that work, these aren't people who say, "Come on, let's go, let's make this place great." These are people who do nothing but complain. They complain. And from where they came from, they got nothing.
You know, if they came from paradise and said this isn't paradise, [fine]. But when they come from hell, and they complain and do nothing but b*tch, we don't want 'em in our country. Let 'em go back to where they came from and fix it."
Ahmed shared his thoughts with Wild on the matter. The interview went thus:
WILD: I did speak with one man who pointed out an irony. There is tr– support for President Trump in the Somali community.
Here's more from Mohammed Ahmed.
WILD: How did it make you feel when you heard the President say that?
AHMED: I got five children. My children are not garbage!
WILD: What would you say to the President if he were standing here right now?
AHMED: Mr President, we campaigned for you. We have hope in you. We see hope in you. Please differentiate between good, bad, and evil.
I do not understand why Ahmed voted for Trump. Unfortunately, this disappointed man doesn't give specifics beyond stating his amorphous belief that Trump has something to do with hope. What he meant by that, he doesn't say. But whatever he was driving at, it was the triumph of wishful thinking over rational analysis.
Mohamed's request to Trump that he "Please differentiate between good, bad, and evil" is also naive. Trump has already done that calculus and put Ahmed in the bad-to-evil box. Trump is 79 and way beyond any possibility that he will change his opinion on Black Somalis.
I could perhaps understand Ahmed's disappointment if this were 2016. And Trump's opinions on racial and religious factors were not as etched in the public record as they were in 2024. But Ahmed had eight years' worth of Trump's distaste for people who look and worship like him to contemplate when he decided how to vote. And yet he still voted for a man who thinks anyone named Mohammed is a terrorist.
Will Rogers reportedly said, "There are three kinds of men. The one who learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves." Regardless of whether Rogers actually said it, Ahmed has placed himself firmly in the 'pee on the electric fence' crowd.
No one should expect to agree with everything any candidate stands for. But it is self-harm to vote for a politician who runs on hate for your very essence — ie, your ethnicity, religion, gender, and orientation. Yet people do. Where is their pride?
