The speech was, in that familiar Trumpian way, about permission: who gets to be here, who gets to be counted, who gets to be treated as American. And, to illustrate this, Trump reached for one of his favorite targets: Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, a Somali American citizen whose presence in this country has infuriated Trump for nearly a decade (and for whom I used to work as a political communications operative):
We are scapegoating asylum seekers for the failures and political divisions caused by successive governments in the last 15 years the failures of successive governments to address wealth inequality, funding for education, the cost of living and primary healthcare and infrastructure. Every day I meet homeless people who have fallen through the cracks in our system. And yet in singling out asylum seekers we are laying the burden of society's problems on less than 1% of the UK population
