What Ilhan Omar symbolized when she was attacked — and why it drives Trump crazy

Jan. 29, 2026, 9:03 PM EST

Despite the hand-wringing over the male loneliness crisisincel culture and videos of masked men playing war games in Midwestern cities, the real cultural battle in America is not a war over masculinity. Right now, our country is engaged in a battle over which kind of woman has the right to exist.

Nowhere has this been clearer recently than when Rep. Ilhan Omar was attacked Tuesday night at a north Minneapolis town hall. A man suddenly rushed toward Omar, shouting and squirting a dark liquid from a syringe. As he lunged at her, Omar stepped toward him, fist raised.

For the record, the man was swiftly tackled by security. But the video of the event shows how Omar instinctively refused to back down. Faced with the option of flight, she chose to fight. In that moment, she instantly displayed more power than any Himmler-esque sizzle reel of Customs and Border Protection commander Gregory Bovino. Omar reflexively acted tougher than those ICE agents spraying chemical irritants at unarmed protesters in Minnesota.

With the exception of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, there are few people that President Donald Trump has gone out of his way to insult more than Ilhan Omar. Omar’s very existence seems to bother the president. He has called her “garbage” and told her to go back to her country. Around the time Omar was attacked on Tuesday, the president was addressing a rally in Clive, Iowawhere he again insulted her and called Somalia a country of crooks and pirates.

Omar bothers Trump, certainly. The president went so far as to suggest she had staged the assaultwhich is a classic misogynistic tactic — to claim the woman made it all up.

But think about why she gets under his skin. She exemplifies all that this administration cannot control: powerful, independent women.

In a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson that resurfaced during the 2024 presidential campaignthen-Sen. JD Vance called Democrats (and corporate oligarchs) “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” His sneering words imply that women who are single and childless aren’t worth consideration.

This is not merely a degrading talking point. From the moment the Trump administration took office, it has attacked the definitions of who and what women can be and the rights we are allowed to have.

Consider: Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” attacks transgender women by restricting definitions of gender. While the order says it seeks to “protect women,” what it actually does is hurt both cisgender women and LGBTQ people by rescinding policies put in place to mandate and ensure equalityas well as ending health programs designed to ensure equity.

The Trump administration has also aggressively gone after reproductive rights, making cuts to federal programs that protect women’s health and using other measures to restrict access to contraceptives and abortion. The result has been a devastating rollback of the right to an abortion that has left the maternal health outcomes in this country worse than ever before.

And the assault doesn’t end there. The attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, efforts and the end of work-from-home policies have resulted in thousands of women, particularly Black women, being forced out of the workforce at a rate comparable to white women’s unemployment during the bleakest points of the Great Recession.

Trump’s international policies also hurt women. The dissolution of the U.S. Agency for International Development ended maternal health care programs. The Trump administration cut funding for programs that combat trafficking. Women and children account for two-thirds of global trafficking victims.

Even the aggressive fight over immigration unfolding in American cities uses women’s bodies as collateral. The conceit is to protect the “nice white” women from the violent immigrants. From the day Trump launched his first presidential campaign in 2015 with a speech in which he called Mexican men “rapists,” Trump has used the specter of white women’s bodies to justify virulently racist policies. But when these policies are established, they actually hurt women and families. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations are ripping apart families and have resulted in the detention of more than 3,800 children.

In early January, the Heritage Foundation put out a paper outlining policies that would “protect the American family.” Those policies include removing funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — the formal name for food stamps — and other federal measures designed to benefit single mothers. The Heritage proposal also calls for boosting marriage and birth rates and ending no-fault divorce. When no-fault divorce was established, it resulted in a significant decrease in reports of domestic violence and rates of suicide by women. Ending it is another way of revoking women’s freedom to leave.

The message from this administration is clear, down to the sheath dress and heavy makeup: There is only one right way to be a woman. Only one right way to exist in your body. And if you don’t comply, you become a target of violence.

Renee Good learned this the hard way. Video of her death recorded by the ICE agent who shot her captures his disdain when, after firing, he calls her a “f—ing bitch.” She was queer. She was what this administration fundamentally doesn’t want women to be, and that is free.

Part of what makes the resistance to immigration raids in Minnesota so powerful is that they are organized and led by the very types of women that this administration denigrates: single mothers, women of color, cat ladies and other women who refuse to comply with the meager versions of who and what we are allowed to be. The protests have been sustained by organized gangs of so-called ANTIFA wine moms, working women and other neighbors who have mounted an effective defense, down to their whistles. For this, they’ve been sneered at by administration officials and Fox News pundits, who mockingly call them AWFLs, or Affluent White Female Liberals.

Fox News host Jesse Watters talked about this women-led rebellion in Minnesota, asserting that “sometimes women have to be protected whether they like it or not.” Actually, that sums up how the administration’s approach isn’t about protection but compliance.

The Trump administration’s policies are not making America great again but are about making women compliant again. It’s about using policy and harassment to force women into a definition of womanhood that is easier to contain. A time and place where, as a country song suggests, “You line your lips and keep ’em closed.” A reality where you raise your own babies and look away when the state attacks someone else’s.

Which brings us back to the president’s least favorite member of Congress: Omar, stepping forward at a moment of assault, her fist raised to defend herself. She presented an image of a woman who will not be bound, who will not be complicit in her own oppression. A woman who will always and forever fight back.

Lyz Lenz is the author of the book “This American Ex-Wife.”She lives in Iowa and writes the newsletter “Men Yell at Me.”