Sometimes, one crisis seems to lead to another for President Donald Trump — and he’s got plenty of trouble brewing.

For months now, Trump’s approval rating has taken a beating for the knock-on effects of the government shutdown and the ongoing fiasco over the Jeffrey Epstein files. In November, his administration came under fire over newly reported details about the airstrikes on drug-trafficking suspects in the Caribbean, which seem to indicate that wounded people were deliberately killed in violation of the conventions of war. Trump also responded to the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington — allegedly by an Afghani refugee who had formerly worked with American intelligence in Afghanistan — by suspending all Afghani immigration cases, leading many critics to decry the move as collective punishment. 

Amid all this anguish, Trump took the opportunity at a Cabinet meeting Tuesday to advance collective punishment against another immigrant group that he doesn’t like: Somalis. 

On Nov. 21, Trump posted on social media that he was revoking temporary protected status for Somalis living in Minnesota. 

“They contribute nothing,” Trump told reporters in a rambling tirade in the Cabinet meeting. “I don’t want them in our country.” 

Trump further averred that the war-torn East African country from which they fled “stinks” and that they are “garbage.” 

Even for Trump, who once infamously dismissed African nations and other developing nations as “shithole countries,” the malevolence and vulgarity of his anti-Somali outbursts was stunning. 

And what end did he imagine they served? 

Casting a broad shadow of suspicion on immigrants from other nations, especially nonwhite and Islamic ones, has been a yearslong pattern for Trump and his deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller. 

But the Somali angle likely has much to do with the recent Trump administration tack of punishing blue states and Democratic political leaders. The largest Somali expatriate community in the U.S. resides in Minnesota, home to U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar and Gov. Tim Walz, two favorite subjects of Trump invective. 

Some 80,000 people of Somali birth or ancestry reside in the state, and the vast majority are U.S. citizens. Omar emigrated from Somalia in 1995 as a child. 

Minnesota’s Somali community has taken a public relations hit recently following reports of the U.S. Department of Justice’s prosecution of individuals involved in a wide-ranging scheme to defraud Minnesota and federal government programs during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. 

It’s a major issue, and more than $1 billion in taxpayer money has been stolen, according to The New York Times. The DOJ investigation, started during the Biden administration, centers on a nonprofit group called Feeding Our Future, which worked with the Minnesota Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to distribute meals to children. 

The defendants, who are mostly but not all members of the Somali community, submitted false invoices and meal count sheets, set up bogus programs for autistic children, and took or gave kickbacks for participation in the fraud. 

It’s disgraceful behavior, and it’s good that the fraudsters are being prosecuted. However, Trump could not help himself from taking the outrage across the line of collective calumny. 

Picking up on allegations by Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, and Ryan Thorpe, a reporter for the institute’s City Journal, that money stolen from Minnesota programs has gone to al-Shabab, an al-Qaida-linked militant group that controls parts of Somalia, Trump branded the Minnesota Somali community “a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity” and vowed to send them “back to where they came from.” 

“We can go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way, if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Trump said. “Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage! Her friends are garbage!” 

In response to the president, Omar fortunately kept her cool. “I hope,” she said graciously, “he gets the help he desperately needs.” 

From your lips to God’s ear, Congresswoman. 

The writer is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.