A Trump advisor just called Rep. Ilhan Omar a terrorist. Why is this our new normal?

Trigger Warning: Islamophobia

Katrina Pierson, a senior advisor on United States President Donald Trump's campaign team, has yet again lashed out at Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. In a post uploaded to her Instagram Story, she likened the member of the House of Representatives to a terrorist. This is not the first time that the advisor has been blatantly Islamophobic. Just last year, she used a fake video of "rocket fire in Gaza" to attack Omar. The video was actually from a missile fire in 2015 during the Ukrainian conflict against Russian-backed separatists. This time, she wasn't even subtle about her bigotry.

Pierson shared a meme featuring Omar and Trump. In the first image, you can see a photo of Omar with the statement "I hate Trump" written in bold print. Below her photo is one of Trump with the following sentence written atop: "Most terrorist do." Okay, first of all, let's get the glaring typo out of the way. I mean, you're risking your entire political career in order to support perhaps the worst President in history and you don't even want to spend the extra minute using spell check on your poorly made meme? Come on, even 12-year-olds on TikTok have made better memes with greater production value than this.

Alright, now that we've addressed that, let's move on to the actual insult, shall we? This meme is actually, to my surprise, quite layered. There are so many observations to make from this seemingly simple piece of art. First, there's the obvious Islamophobia. She's Somali so she's Muslim and Muslim equals bad. Perhaps it's time to hit the drawing board and come up with something more inventive. After all, with close two billion Muslims on this planet who have experienced some form of discrimination, it tends to get a little bit boring. (Yeah, I said close to two billion. That's just a couple of babies away from 2.3 billion, i.e., the number of Christians in the world right now.)

However, there's another thing that we should talk about, and that's this notion that folks who hate Trump must be terrorists. Why else would absolutely anyone hate the man who's running the United States into the ground as we speak, right? This line of thinking can be dangerous when there are people actually saying that the President could threaten to rewrite the whole Constitution as we know it so he can stay in power longer. No wonder he's been cozying up to good ol' Putin—he's been learning the tricks of the fascist, dictatorial trade. Either way, this meme is simply a reflection of the culture that brought Trump to the White House in the first place. It's time to just throw the whole thing out (that's my call to vote him out, y'all).