trump in mn
President Trump at a rally in Minnesota in October, 2018. The president returns to the state on October 10.
On October 8, I woke to a message from my daughter, who is studying abroad in Spain this fall. “If you get a MAGA code, don’t delete it,” she warned me over WhatsApp.
A MAGA code? Ah, yes. President Donald Trump is coming to Minneapolis on October 10, and she and several of her college-age friends have devised a strategy, from afar, to disrupt his campaign rally: sign up online for a bunch of tickets to the event, and then don’t show up.
I sent her the code so that she could follow through on her plan, keeping my cynicism to myself. A bunch of lefty college students attempting to hijack—from Europe, no less!—seats to the Trump rally in downtown Minneapolis? That will only add fuel to the President’s “us vs. them” furor and embolden those ready for a fight with Minneapolis’s notoriously liberal voters.
Still, her efforts made me smile. Sure, the battle lines being drawn ahead of Trump’s visit are predictable and endemic to his roadshow. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy of a dose of subterfuge, if not outright confrontation.
Take Trump’s penchant for stoking racism to win political battles.
His upcoming visit is being framed as something of a grudge match between Trump and Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minneapolis. Omar is a threat to Trump because she is an unapologetically outspoken critic of his. And, as a Muslim woman of color who knows her way around Twitter as well as Trump, she has become a frequent target of his “like it or get the hell out” rhetoric.
Clearly, the Trump campaign is hoping Minnesota will be up for grabs in 2020 (he came close to beating Hillary Clinton here in 2016). If he can make headway by continually bashing and attempting to undermine Omar, for example casting her as someone who danced rather than mourned on the anniversary of September 11, then of course he will continue to do so.
It would be easy to brush this off as classic, bullying behavior from Trump. But attacks such as these have made Muslims and immigrants in the Twin Cities vulnerable to hate-fueled threats and actual acts of violence and intimidation.
Trump’s attacks have made Muslims and immigrants in the Twin Cities vulnerable to hate-fueled threats and actual acts of violence and intimidation.
Recently, a Minneapolis man was arrested for throwing rocks into local businesses owned by East African immigrants and refugees—although, according to local news coverage, he “spared a white-owned dry cleaning business” in the same area. The perpetrator has since been charged with committing bias crimes.
And, across town in the suburb of Bloomington, the Dar Al-Farooq Youth and Family Center—a mosque that was bombed in 2017 by militia members from rural Illinois—has become the target of online, far-right conspiracy theories fueled by surreptitious videos taken of children and adults as they worship and play in and around the site.
But the attempt to fan the flames of racism goes beyond Trump’s pointed jabs at Omar or his reckless attacks on immigrants.
On September 27, the day after Trump announced his Minneapolis rally, Chief of Police Medaria Arradondo made a declaration of his own: Off-duty Minneapolis police officers will be prohibited from appearing in uniform with any elected official, effective immediately.
Arradondo maintains that the change has been in the works since 2018, when, he says, some community members complained about seeing uniformed officers “endorsing local- and state-level elected officials,” according to NBC News coverage of the decision.
That’s not how Bob Kroll sees it.
Kroll is the outspoken and longstanding leader of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, and he recently went on Fox and Friends to decry Arradondo’s policy change, arguing that officers have been “allowed to appear for decades in political ads.”
The difference now, Kroll bullishly indicated in another appearance on Fox News, is that many police officers are now openly supporting Republican candidates. That’s because Democrats have “turned their back on the police and other working people,” Kroll told former Minnesotan and current Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who described Kroll as “outraged” over Arradondo’s decision.
Not one to roll over easily, Kroll then announced, on October 7, that the police union will be selling bright red t-shirts with the words Cops for Trump printed on the front, along with a star-spangled map of Minnesota studded with the outline of various official-looking badges.
Make no mistake—this is Kroll throwing down a racial gauntlet.
Arradondo is Minneapolis’s first African American police chief, who rose to his position in the wake of the 2015 killing, by police, of Jamar Clark, a young African American man. Siding with Trump over Arradondo strikes me as a refusal, by Kroll and his ilk, to yield power at a time when police in both Minneapolis and St. Paul are grappling with increased gun violence and long-standing tension with marginalized communities.
“We really appreciate the President and what he’s done for law enforcement,” Kroll assured Hegseth. It is worth remembering that, in 2017, police chiefs across the country criticized Trump for “encouraging police brutality,” as The Washington Post reported.
So, my daughter’s overseas attempt to mess with Trump and embarrass him with no-show tickets to his October 10 rally isn’t likely to amount to much. Empty arena seats will never be broadcast by Fox and Friends, after all.
And yes, there will be plenty of on-the-ground protest by local labor groups, as well as the appearance of not one, but two giant baby Trump balloons—the kind that have popped up over the heads of boisterous, anti-Trump crowds from London to Washington, D.C.
But what will we be left with, once the Trump circus and the giant baby balloons have left town? A stack of Cops for Trump shirts, perhaps, and a deepened divide between us and them.