The Donald Trump Experience

On Wednesday night I got a call from the White House asking if I planned to attend last night’s rally at Target Center. I wanted to avoid the unpleasantness the left had planned for the president and his supporters, so I had not. I was invited to attend as a guest of the president and given the impression he wanted to discuss my work on Ilhan Omar with me. I thought he wanted to debrief me for additional material and I was certainly game.

My wife and I were treated royally by the president’s staff. When we were ushered in to meet the president, I discovered that President Trump only wanted to compliment me for my work on Omar. He could not have been more gracious. Thank you, Mr. President.

My wife told the president she doesn’t understand how he can do what he is doing while under nonstop assault. “I don’t either,” he said. It was both self-deprecating and funny.

Let me emphasize here that we would not have a bead on the Omar saga if it weren’t for the incredibly dogged work of Preya Samsundar at Alpha News and David Steinberg at PJ Media last year, now on his own. I am deeply indebted to my Somali sources for the work I have done on the Omar story this year. I will return to them in a subsequent post.

Watching the speech — video of the rally below — I thought this was Trump in full. It was a terrific speech. I learn from Patrick Coolican’s Morning Hot Dish newsletter that it was the second longest of Trump’s presidency.

A highly respected political science professor wrote me last night with her brief review of the event: “This rally is one for the ages. So glad you were there. He is hitting it out of the stratosphere. I can only imagine the MSM reaction.”

Target Center in downtown Minneapolis was the venue for last night’s rally. Because Target Center is located near the heart of Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District, Ilhan Omar was an inevitable topic of the president’s speech. The president turned to Omar beginning at about 1:03:00. He talked about me and Power Line at about 1:07:30 (speech text here). Our publisher has kindly posted this segment of the speech here.

Referring to my work on Omar, the president observed: “Man, do you have her figured out — figured out. The problem is they never pick it up. They don’t want to pick it up, but we pick it up, Scott, and the people get it and we thank you for your great reporting.” The president proceeded to quote my observation — he was quoting from the post “Stand by your sham: Datapoints” — that everything about Omar is a fraud, including her name.

My point, and I do have one, is this. Illustrating the president’s observation about the media, the Star Tribune makes no mention of any of this in Patrick Condon’s story on the speech.

KARE 11 makes no mention of any of this in its minute-by-minute “fact-check” of the rally. It doesn’t extract any of the quotes from Power Line or the president’s media criticism. Rather, we have this (comment on 8:31 p.m. clip): “Numerous media outlets have examined this claim, and none have shown any credible, verifiable proof that Omar married her brother.”

The Pioneer Press reduces it to “a shout-out to a writer for a right-wing website, Power Line, who was among the first to report the allegation that Omar married her brother. The allegation has not been substantiated, and Omar has denied it, but she has refused to provide evidence to disprove it, or, in recent months, respond to questions about it.”

Minnesota Public Radio does a little better, but not much.

No mention of what Trump actually said about Omar’s fraudulence or the media’s nonfeasance. Case closed. It’s almost funny.

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