Trump’s posts on singing Somali schoolchildren stir anger in Minnesota

WASHINGTON – The posts nearly slid by in US President Donald Trump’s chaotic social media feed this week, lost in a jumble of boasts about the economy and pictures of Washington landmarks dressed in their Fourth of July best.

But there they were, a video of Somali American kindergartners in blue caps and gowns during their promotion ceremony at their St. Paul, Minnesota, school, and again the same video punctuated by a comment from an anonymous right-wing account called “End Wokeness”: “Every girl is in a hijab... in kindergarten.” In the 14-second video, the children are singing an upbeat Somali educational song.

If Trump’s sharing of the video posts did not cause much national furore, they sent shudders through Minnesota’s large Muslim and Somali communities, whose members expressed indignation that the president was again vilifying them and disbelief that he was doing so by targeting children.

“This was a red line,” said Khalid Omar, a community organiser with the interfaith group Isaiah and Faith, based in St. Paul. “Children who are just celebrating, and wanting to look like their mothers – forget about the hijab – who are just children enjoying themselves, seeing their families, singing. For him to go after those children, it’s awful, it’s dangerous, it’s inhumane, it’s wrong.”

For more than a year, Trump has relentlessly attacked Minnesota’s Somali community in a series of xenophobic tirades. He has disparaged Somali immigrants as “garbage” who should “go back to where they came from”. He has portrayed their children as a burden on schools. And he has demonised Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., including by mocking her hijab as a “little turban””

Seizing on a welfare fraud scandal that was concentrated among Minnesota’s Somali community, his administration launched an immigration crackdown, threatened to cut federal childcare funding and started investigations that a judge found were intended to “harass and retaliate against” Democratic officials in the state.

Even after all of that, Trump’s posts to his nearly 13 million followers on July 6 still struck a particular nerve.

“He is a bigoted bully,” said James J. Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute. “He picks on vulnerable people – women, immigrants – but picking on five-year-olds, it’s so low, even for him.”

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, declined repeated requests for comment on the president’s posts. Instead, she defended his previous statements about Somali schoolchildren burdening Minnesota’s public schools.

“President Trump is right,” Jackson said. “Aliens who come to our country, complain about how much they hate America, fail to contribute to our economy, rip off Americans and refuse to assimilate into our society should not be here. And nothing about that is racist.”

National civil rights organisations and state leaders added to local activists’ condemnation of the posts over the course of the week.

“I am no longer surprised when Donald Trump uses his platform to provoke attacks on Black, brown, or immigrant communities – but I am always disgusted,” said Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison.

But on the other side, messages supporting Trump’s postings – in overwhelmingly racist, Islamophobic and anti-Muslim terms – also grew.

In response to the posts, Trump’s followers called the students “future terrorists” and said the children wearing hijabs were a “disgrace”. They called on him to “deport all Muslims” and to ban Islam. One account with more than 1 million followers declared that Trump had exposed a “terrifying reality” and that America was being “conquered”.

Trump has long used his social media account to amplify racist imagery and vilify immigrant groups. When he posted a racist video depicting former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes this year, the backlash was so swift and bipartisan that Trump removed the post. (He refused to apologise and blamed it on an aide).

This week, Trump also posted a doctored image of the Obamas waving from Air Force One, which had graffiti that included the acronym “BLM” and Arabic writing. When he speaks about the former president, it is often using his middle name, Hussein.

Some critics of the posts noted that Trump has made combating anti-religious bias, particularly against Christians and Jews, a cornerstone of his second term. His recent posts, they said, make it clear that concern seems to apply only to certain groups.

Democratic state Sen. Zaynab Mohamed, the youngest woman ever elected to the Minnesota Senate and its first female Muslim member, said she did not believe that Trump would have posted the video if it showed any other religious group.

“Imagine if these kids were children who were wearing yarmulkes,” she said. “Imagine the reaction people would have. We would all be angry because we should be, because they are just as American as anyone else. And these kids who are wearing a hijab are just as American as the child who goes to a Catholic school that wears a particular uniform.”

National advocacy groups that have tracked the rise of Islamophobia said Trump’s posts were part of a trend of normalising anti-Muslim hate and demeaning rhetoric that has led to violence and could lead to more.

A poll conducted in 2025 by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding found that 63 per cent of Muslims reported experiencing religious discrimination. And 47 per cent of Muslims with children in grades K-12 reported that their children had been bullied for their religious identity in the past year, about twice the rate of the general population. Nearly half the Muslim families whose children had been bullied said it was by an adult.

“This is the context within which Muslims have been living in the United States for a long time,” said Saher Selod, director of research at the institute. “The bar has just been lowered so much in terms of what people can and cannot say about Muslims. We’re waiting for everyone to recognize how dehumanising this is.”

Imam Yussuf Abdulle, director of the Islamic Association of North America, which oversees more than three dozen Islamic centers and groups across the country, said that after the “garbage” comment, his young children asked him of Trump: “Baba, are we OK? What did we do to him? Does he hate us?”

He said he now knows the answer.

“Our president is not sparing the most vulnerable of our community,” he said. “There’s no mercy for us in his heart.”

“What could make you happy, if not a kindergarten graduation?” he added. “If that makes you angry, there is no happiness left.” NYTIMES

• Ernesto Londoño contributed reporting from Minneapolis.

• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.