In the Cabinet Room yesterday, President Trump said that Somali-Americans are “garbage” and that he wants them out of the United States.

No president has ever spoken like this to the American people. Not one. We’ve had good presidents and bad presidents. Great leaders and party hacks. Crooks, liars, and lechers; brave heroes, visionaries, kind men. None of them were saints; each brought to the office their unique strengths—and their inner demons, too.

But all of them, to one degree or another, sought to maintain a sense of decency and dignity in the only office designed by our Founders to represent the whole American nation. That high honor chastened most of them in their rhetoric, inspired some to soaring leadership, and drew at least an outer boundary of public speech for presidents.

This ethic of presidential rhetoric isn’t some prissy, schoolmarmish rule. It is a quintessentially American act of respect for the people of this country, an acknowledgment in the semi-formal diction of public pronouncements by presidents that the power any president holds does not, in fact, belong to him. It’s ours. He works for us.

But Donald Trump is a megalomaniac, and he acknowledges no boundaries. That is disgraceful, of course. It is also dangerous—and exhausting. We are all living inside the mind of this broken, ferocious man.

But Trump’s inner brokenness has real-world consequences. What he said yesterday in the Cabinet Room is deeply ignorant, un-American, and dangerous. And it demands an answer.

First—it’s a stupid thing to say. There are about 200,000 Somali-Americans. Refugees, immigrants, and American-born kids. They came here because they believed that America keeps her promise: that this land is big enough and brave enough to offer safety, dignity and upward mobility to hard-workers and big dreamers from around the world. And just like my Irish ancestors—and probably your ancestors, too—Somali-Americans are working—hard—and starting businesses, paying taxes, raising families.

Trump ignores all that, and tries to exploit a current news story to gin up hatred of all Somalis in America. Right now, a fraud scandal has rocked the Somali-American community in Minneapolis. Scores of people have been indicted for swindling vast sums of money from the US government. So—surprise—there is crime, major crime, in that immigrant community. Like there was in the Irish community in the 1920s in Chicago. Or the Sicilian community in the 1950s (and beyond) in New York. Et cetera. Trump doesn’t care about all the Somali-Americans who do not commit crimes. He just wants to use the ones who do to exercise his hatreds—and persuade others to hate with him.

The truth is quieter than Trump’s viciousness.

Every day in America, thousands upon thousands of Somali-Americans do the normal indispensable work that keeps this country going: driving trucks, caring for the elderly, staffing warehouses, working in hospitals, keeping food supply chains alive, supporting one another through mosques, community centers, and mutual-aid networks. They strengthen our country.

To call such people “garbage” is not just a lie. It is a moral disgrace. It is the language of someone who wants to divide Americans into those who belong and those who can be discarded. It stems from the mind and heart of a man who treats human beings as refuse.

This is the vocabulary of dehumanization. And we know where that leads. History teaches it with painful clarity: first you target a vulnerable group with slurs, then with policy, then with force. Look at the timing — the administration is escalating enforcement operations in Minnesota. Words like “garbage” are not slips of the tongue. They are signals.

Real patriotism is not about bloodlines or birthplace. It is measured by what you build, not what you tear down. Somali-Americans have built new lives, new communities, and new futures here. Just like my ancestors. And yours. They represent the resilience and renewal that have always defined this country at its best.