Dog ate my better response, but 9/11 we took a planned hit from a shit disturber not too dissimilar from Trump in ways, and collectively (not just Republicans)  lost our shit - invading the wrong country, killing hundreds of thousands, drone bombing countries outside our war zone including Ilhan's native Somalia, adding torture and murder of civilians to our toolkit, and bringing home leftover weapons from our trillion dollar spending spree to militarize the police force from "serve and protect" to "shoot/tase first, arrest later", especially for black people, even though the prime target of our hatred and hostility was a whole 'nuther set, Muslims - who due to passing brown skinned similarities passed on our paranoia to Hispanics ( a real economic/logistics issue, but not a security issue).

In short, we became America's Stupidest Generation - wasting our peace dividend on phantasms in the dark rather than actual large well-armed vicious armies of our parents' and grandparents' generations. Yeah, a guy flew a couple hijacked airplanes into our tallest buildings so we went all crazed and psychotic and self-destructive for 2 decades? Sounds unbelievable for a pulp fiction novel,Tom Clancy would've been ashamed - yet here we are. Will we double down and make it America's Stupidest Generation 2.0? Or have we had enough of ritual self-humiliation and failed interventions? Fuck the Republicans, vote in Democrats and sanity, come back out into the light where our daemons are largely illusory but we have much real work to do.

I see no evidence to back up your claim. I searched for any poll I could find on Ilhan Omar and found nothing. I doubt that a majority of people have even heard of her or are following any of these controversies. Do you have any polling information or is this just your guess?

Trump is a master at diversion. It boosts the Republican base. Republicans are racists and bigots. People who are now racists and bigots would at least criticize his words on minorities and immigrants.

Rational people realize that Omar’s words were taken out of context. The Republican base approved of Trump’s Muslim ban. They have no problem with Trump’s statement that he saw Muslims rejoicing after the Twin Towers fell. Some on the Right are falsely saying that the cathedral at Notre Dame was attacked by Muslims. They turned a blind eye when Barack Obama was said to be a Muslim. The rot was already in the Republican Party before Trump showed up to fertilize the ground. 

Masha Gesson studies authoritarian states. Trump is an authoritarian. His attack on Omar is predictable.

You know how bullying works. The victim is marked long before the bullying begins: it’s the kid no one really likes, the weirdo who is barely tolerated by the larger group. The defenseless, isolated kid. And when the bullying starts to happen, the rest of the children look the other way. Even the ones the victim thought were his friends go silent. Especially the ones he thought were his friends.

Political violence can work the same way. In modern states ruled by autocrats, or aspiring autocrats, political violence is dispersed and delegated. Its first weapons are ridicule and ostracism. Once a person has been marginalized and discredited among allies, physical violence becomes a likely option. In Russia, I witnessed this several times among people I knew, who stood alone and embattled before they were killed. The Parliament member Galina Starovoitova, who had once been a prominent member of Boris Yeltsin’s Cabinet, was, by the late nineteen-nineties, portrayed by the Russian media as someone whose ideas were outdated and irrelevant. She was shot dead in the stairwell of her apartment building, in November of 1998. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya was an often short-tempered person whose reporting was viewed as partisan and unreliable by many of her more mainstream colleagues. She was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building, in October of 2006. The politician Boris Nemtsov, once viewed as Yeltsin’s most likely successor, was by the twenty-tens seen as an old-timer who, even as he protested the regime, didn’t quite grasp the new language of protest. He was shot dead on a bridge in central Moscow, in February of 2015. In all three cases, the people convicted or accused of the murder did not have a direct relationship to the Kremlin but were seemingly moved by a desire to act on their loyalty to it.

After their deaths, all three victims were idealized. Most Americans who have heard of them probably imagine that they were widely revered. They certainly deserved to be widely revered, but in fact they had been abandoned, late in life, even by many of those who should have been their political allies. They were difficult people with uncomfortable views; standing by their sides in an increasingly hostile political environment was hard work. But, by omitting this part of the story, we elide a key fact about contemporary political violence: bullies don’t go after the strong. In Russia, the anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny is walking around, not only alive but also mostly free, solely because the government knows that he has the support of hundreds of thousands of people who will protest if he is jailed and may revolt if he is killed. His life depends on this support.

For the past three months, Americans have observed the process of drawing a target on a politician’s back. The politician is Representative Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota. Two of her fundamental positions—that the United States government and many of its elected officials support an apartheid regime in Israel-Palestine, and that the civil rights of Muslims in the U.S. are routinely trampled by entities that include the government—are as uncomfortable for many Americans as they are indisputable. Her way of expressing those positions—unabashed, and at times seemingly unaware of context—makes her the kind of disagreeable person who is easy for presumptive allies to shun. This, in turn, makes her vulnerable to attack

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-dangerous-bullying-of-...

The only patriotic response is to defend those under attack. Trump and his supporters are salivating over the danger Omar faces because of their words