Bulwark Takes - Man Rushes Ilhan Omar With Syringe at Town Hall

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

Andrew Egger and Will Saletan give their takes on the attack at an Ilhan Omar town hall in Minnesota, where a man rushed the podium and sprayed her with an unknown substance before being arrested. Donald Trump’s response was to dismiss the attack and blame Omar. Andrew and Will break down the Republican reactions to the attack, including Rep. Randy Fine’s attempt to condemn the violence while justifying it, and what it says about the state of American politics.

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Hey guys, it's Andrew Eger with the bulwark, joined here by my colleague Will Salatan to talk about something crazy that happened last night in Minnesota. Getting a little sick of talking about the crazy stuff happening in Minnesota. This is a little bit of a different one. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was at a constituent town hall meeting last night in her district when she was very suddenly interrupted by a man who was sitting in the front row who charged the podium where she was speaking, sprayed an unknown liquid from a syringe in his hand all over the Congresswoman and was then kind of broke up the event. He was arrested. She was sort of shaken up, but pretty quickly returned to the event. Let's just watch that take place right now. We must abolish ice for good. And DHS Secretary Kristy Noem must resign or face impeachment.

I don't know. I need a napkin. I need a napkin to know nothing. No, we won't continue. No, no, no. You need to go get checked. No. We won't continue.

These fucking assholes are not going to get away with it. You need to go get checked. No, whatever this smells so bad, she needs to go get checked. He's, I don't know what that was. That's what they want. It's not about him, Gilhine. It's not about him. It's about your safety.

No, he sprays something on you. You need to go get shared. Yeah, and it smells terrible. We're going to keep talking. Just in 10 minutes. Yeah, so you can tell very chaotic situation right there. You can kind of understand where everybody's coming from. You know, she is wanting to continue the event.

Her people around her are saying, look, just because, you know, this isn't something that you're in pain from now, doesn't mean it's not something we need to check out and figure out what the heck he just sprayed on you. We don't know what that is except that it smells bad. The perpetrator was arrested. You know, we're all learning a little bit more about him. But as is often the case with these sorts of stories, we get sort of like the crazy initial thing. And then we get to digest all of the kind of like horrible responses to it. So just a couple of hours after this happened, Donald Trump was asked whether he'd seen what had happened,

asked to weigh in. This is from ABC's Rachel Scott. She says she asked him if he'd seen the video. He says, and this is a quote from Donald Trump, no, I don't think about her. I don't think about Ilhan Omar. I think she's a fraud. I really don't think about that. She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her.

She asked again, if he had seen the video. He said, I haven't seen it. No, no. I hope I don't have to bother. So that's the president of the United States reacting to this very unsettling moment of a congresswoman being assaulted at a political event, at a constituent, constituent event. Will, what the heck, man?

I mean, what do you even say about something like this? I guess let me start with your reaction to the video itself. What did you make of the news? from last night well first of all ilan omar is a tough lady i mean the guy is much bigger than her he comes at her and i don't know if people can see from that angle from the side of the stage but she goes after him yes he comes up with his whatever that thing was he was squirting maybe it was a syringe i guess i couldn't tell uh and when i i i had first read about this i saw you know the report about it so then when i see the video it's not at all what i expected i thought you know she she recoils she runs

No, no, no, no, no. She's almost right away stepping out at him. He's backing away from her. Then they get that guy on the ground. And then her security guy, whoever's the security guy for the event, is really in her face. Like, you've got to leave. We've got to end this thing. This guy, you can see in that video, the guy is, what, eight inches taller than her and twice her weight?

I mean, it's like a different species. He's so big compared to her. And she is not having it. And so, I mean, credit to her, look, she grew up for the first, I don't know how many years of her life in Somalia, right? And so she's seen way, way worse than somebody rushing a podium in the United States. So credit to her for being tough for finishing the event, for waving off the men who tried to tell her to stop and go away. And she said something really interesting, Andrew. when she comes back to the podium, she says,

we're not going to let these assholes stop us. She says, we are Minnesota strong. And that's a really important word, Minnesota, because what Donald Trump has been trying to do to Ilan Omar and all of the Somali residents, Somali ancestry residents of Minnesota, including naturalized Americans, is to other them.

He's trying to say, they're not real Americans and they should leave our country. And she's saying, no, no, no, we are Americans. We are Minnesotans. You are the outsider. You've come into our state. You're shooting our people. And we are here to defend our land.

And it's the United States. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just a really crazy striking moment for all sorts of reasons. You have her other staff are there, not the security person, but, you know, just her staffer who's there saying, like, yes, I understand what, where you're coming from on this. understand that you want to be defiant in this moment, but also like, you know, it's not about him. It's about making sure that you're safe. So, but I mean, but she does. She did carry on the event kind of in defiance of what, of what the staff were asking her to do in that moment. I said,

I said syringe a minute ago. That's, that's the word that people have been using. It's not like a, not like a hypodermic syringe. It wasn't like a needle involved or anything like that. It was one of those like, you know, medication dispense, like an oral syringe that, like, for thinking like, like, baby Tylenol or something like that. Like a big one of those is sort of the, the idea. I don't know. Somebody, there's probably a term for that. Somebody put it in the comments. I'll learn something from this video. But, but yes. So, so really a striking response from Yelan Omer there. Unfortunately, we also have to talk about the big dumb president, because we always do.

Every story he sort of barges into and rubs himself all over in these really unpleasant ways. So, I don't know, what's your first blush take on on, on, should we go straight to? She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her. I mean, like, that's the really, it's all. remarkable. Everything about the way that that Trump relates to Ilhan Omar is remarkable. But that obviously stands out as like, you know, just just this sort of like false flag instinct that the president has in, he's very simpatico with sort of like on the online right in this. The stories that make us look bad are always these false flag operations. Yeah. Well, I mean, it brings me back to all

kinds of things, you know, Jesse Smollett, but also like January 6th, the way that Trump tries to, you know, revise what happened in that, in that attack on the Capitol, often, he often pretends that people who are actual victims, whom he wants to portray as not victims or as the actual perpetrators, that they stage things that were actually done by. I mean, in this case, Andrew, what's crazy to me is Donald Trump himself is, you know, an explicit recidivist inciter of attacks on Somalis, on Somali Americans. I mean, his rhetoric against Somali Americans and against Ilan Omar in particular over the last couple of months is just prolific. I mean, constant. And so he knows, he must know that there are. And again, as we sit here, neither of us knows the details about this guy and why he went at Omar. But like, if you as a law enforcement officer, you're investigating this, you want to know what is the motives of this guy. One of the first things that's going to leap to your mind is that this particular legislator that this guy has attacked is someone who has been explicitly targeted by the president of the United States for months. And so it's completely bizarre for the perp.

Donald Trump to then say, oh, she must have done it to herself when the most obvious explanation is somebody motivated by Trump. Again, we don't know it, but it's the first thing that would occur to you as a law enforcement person. The other thing I got a flag on this is Trump saying, you know, Rachel Scott says, have you seen the video? And Trump says, no, and I hope I don't have to bother. That's a whole other species of pathology, right? I don't need to look at the video. I mean, there is a video. He could look at it. We've just looked at it. It was available right away. He's the president of the United States. Anyone could come in and show it to him. We all saw when he was interviewed by the New York Times, bring in the laptop. I'll show you the

video, the video, but he doesn't want to see this one. And it's akin to all of the Minnesota videos we've seen, right, the killings of Rachel Good, of Alex Prattie, where the video itself Trump either doesn't look at or doesn't care about and people in the Trump administration disregard what is actually on the video. So for him to say, I don't even need to see. I don't even need to see it is just part and parcel of the administration's refusal to look at visual evidence. Okay, so that's, I'm being a little bit harsh, am I? Andrew, do you have a kinder, gender take? No, no, it's an extremely rich text. I mean, the other thing I was going to key on, which you didn't even mention, was the, the, I don't think about her.

This is, I mean, this is just like the, maybe the biggest lie of the whole bunch. I mean, like, he talks about her constantly. He brings her up all the time. He talked about her on stage at the World Economic Forum, you know, he got into how he thinks that, you know, she's made a bunch of money illicitly, which he keeps saying, has never brought forward a shred of evidence about, and that she's not going to get away with it much longer. That's a direct quote. She's not going to get away with it for much longer. Let me tell you is what the president said about Ilhan Omar in Davos to like a world audience randomly the other day. There's so many different ways in which this is just sort of the usual appalling, striking behavior. It is also,

this has also become one of these stories where it just becomes obvious that this is not a thing that just sticks with the president and his personal pathologies. It's, you know, one of the many, many ways in which those pathologies have sort of metastasized across the broader Republican right. I'll just, here's a couple more quotes. Let me, let me give you this. Or actually, let's, let's, let's do a little bit more video. Indulge me, Will, with a little bit more video. Because here's Congressman Randy Fine, who is a pretty new member of the House of Representatives. He's a Republican from Florida. His big thing is that he is like trying to be the, the best buddy that Israel has ever had in Congress. Like, he wants to be in the Hall of Fame in that respect. And so, you know, he, he is

part of the very, like, anti-Islam faction as far as, like, you know, the sliding scale of Republicans, he's way out on one side of that. So it doesn't love Elon Omer very much. So let's, let's take a quick look at this video. I got to start out. with your reaction to the attack on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. I mean, obviously, you know, we often agree with her politics, but this is just not acceptable at any level. Well, I've got two thoughts. First, look, I want Elon Omar to be deported and denaturalized,

but I don't want her to be attacked or hurt, and people shouldn't do this sort of thing. But I also blame Elon Omar for what happened. When they describe people throwing articles at law enforcement at officers of the federal government as peaceful protest, They can't be surprised when crazy people start to do that to them. Really good stuff. I don't know.

What do you make of that, Will? Okay. So when you're, first of all, I want to bring, come back to Davos for a minute. Trust me, I'll connect this. Trump in his speech at Davos went after Amar, went after Somali Americans. And he talked about, he tells the Europeans, you don't want to be importing these bad cultures. We import, you're importing these foreign cultures, meaning dark skin people from Africa, people like, Yelan Omar, right? And that's corrupting you, right? In reality, what is happening in the United

States is we do have a sickening culture. Our culture is diseased. And the person who has diseased, it is Donald Trump. And what Randy Fine is doing there is like that is a culture in decline. It is a bad moral example set from the top that you can target people based on their ethnicity, make up lies about them, which is what they've done about. Omar, say that those people should be denaturalized and deported. Just to be clear what Randy finds talking about, an American citizen, someone who is sworn an oath to this country, who is serving in Congress, we're going to revoke your citizenship and we're going to send you back to the country of your birth or your parents' birth or whatever, right?

When we talk about when I, I won't put this word in your mouth, Andrew. When I talk about a fascist government in the United States, this is part of what I'm talking about. People say, oh, it can happen here. It is happening here. This is the president, and after him, members of Congress who follow him, saying that a certain ethnic group in this country is illegitimate, is bad for us. Trump said they're garbage. That's what he said at a cabinet meeting in early December. He said this.

And Andrew, every cabinet member, I mean, I can't say everyone. But when Trump said they were garbage and they should get out of our country, there was pounding on the table. from multiple people. You can see Pete Higgs'is sitting next to him. So we have in Randy Fine and some other members of Congress on the Republican side and in the president's cabinet

the dispersal of this sick culture of hatred and of ethnic division and of targeting an ethnic group and wanting them out of this country. And it's spreading. And so, you know, we have to stop it. And the way we stop it is not by saying only white people can be here.

It's by setting a contrary example and standing up to the, president and repudiating him, which so far I don't hear any Republicans doing, do you? No, no. I mean, not everybody has been doing the Randy Fine model, but I'll just mention one other example because this is sort of the ordinarily, or at least for the last decade or so, a lot of what you have seen in these situations is normie Republicans, quote unquote, you know, sticking up for the typical American value, but then immediately just to, you know, just, defying or declining to comment on Donald Trump declining to do that.

So here is Josh Hawley, Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, my home state of Missouri, speaking about this attack yesterday. You can dislike those positions. You could be vocal about that. You want to protest somebody, fine, have at it. But disrupting their meetings, their rallies, their town halls, and assaulting on, Mike, that's, I mean, no way. The president came out and said that he thought this was staged, the Ilan Omar attack.

Are you okay with him saying that? I have no knowledge about that one way or another. But should he be saying that? Well, I don't even know what he meant by a mono. This is the first time I've heard. Yeah, I mean, so you get you, and this is, you can put these things in conversation with each other, right? Because it is a decade of that move of sort of like the Josh Hawleyism right there, a decade of that sort of thing where you just let the kind of cancer that you're talking about. You let this poison continue to pump out of this guy who's in charge of your party.

And you should not be at all surprised when, you know, as time goes on, more and more new faces show up in the party who are not going to do the same song and dance as you, who are not going to, you know, continue to pay lip service to those values and to say, well, of course, you know, of course, you know, this is beyond the pale and this shouldn't happen. And, you know, we stand up for all these good old star spangled red, white and blue values, except for when the president doesn't. And then we just ignore it. You're going to have more and more people who embrace it. more and more people who do the same thing as the president or go farther than the president in all these different ways. So it's all very good, very normal and very cool in all of these. And I mean, I don't know.

It's just, it makes you sick. Anything else on this, Will? Yeah. So there were 10 years ago when Donald Trump started behaving this way publicly as a presidential candidate, there were Republicans who said no to him. There were people like Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie. they're all gone. They're all gone. The Republican Party has purged all of the people who stood up to the president's flagrant racism and his bigotry. And they've all been replaced by people like

Josh Hawley or Randy Fine, who, A, won't stand up to Trump, won't denounce anything he says, no matter how bigoted it. And B, we'll parrot it in the case of Randy Fine, and we'll see how many other people follow them. So it's a sick culture within the Republican Party that we haven't stood up to. I want to do want to say one other thing. In addition to Trump saying that the Somalis are garbage and they should get out of our country, which should scare the hell out of us as Americans because Trump's not going after the Jews. He's got a Jewish son-in-law. He's got Jewish grandchildren. But he is going after the Somalis, Somali Americans. And there is no scandal among 80 Somalis in Minnesota that should just justify the targeting of all Somalis, which is what Donald Trump has done. But Andrew, he has also

been talking a lot within the last few days about shooting the Somali pirates. How this, you know, he says Somalia is not, it's not even a real country. We go, we shoot them. He said it just yesterday in Iowa in his speech. He talks about, we shoot them out of the water. They go out, we blow them up. And he said in the speech in Iowa, boom, boom, boom, just like the drug dealers. You know, the next day a guy comes up and squirt something at Ilanamo, I'm grateful it wasn't worse than that. And maybe it's totally unrelated.

But even if this incident isn't a direct result of things Donald Trump has said, Ilhan Omar is her safety is going to be in jeopardy for as long as Donald Trump is stirring up this kind of hatred and violence against people of her ethical. background. Yeah, more longer. I mean, it's not like, you know, Donald Trump moves on to something else tomorrow. It's not like he hasn't been pumping this stuff out there. And it's, and, you know, people, people, did these things metastasize. People hang on to them. People, they curdle in, in, in the minds of the people who, who, who take this stuff seriously. So it's a, it's a scary situation. We're obviously going to keep an eye on this story. I'm sure there's going to be more

that comes out about the perp. Who knows? Maybe we'll even find out what the heck he was, he was squirting around up there. Doesn't seem like, we know much about it right now. Other than that, it smelled really bad. So we'll keep on it. Thanks, Will, for coming on and talking about it a little bit today. Thanks to you all out there for watching. We hope you'll subscribe to the feed. I also have one quick programming note before I let you go, which is that if you're out there, you ought to be saving the date for our 2026 live tour, which is going to kick off February 19th in the Twin Cities. Sarah, JVL, and Tim are going to be there. They're going where the action's happening. And then after that, they will head presumably to a chiller area in the Lone Star State,

going to do one night in Dallas on March 18th and one night in Austin on March 19th. So you can watch your inbox for all that if you're subscribed over at the bulwark.com. And you can head to the bulwark.com slash events to get more about all that stuff. Hope to see you out there. All right. Thanks, everybody. And we'll see you next time.