The Twitter post from the president stoked a controversy that has been a focus of conservative news outlets, which have sought to elevate Omar, D-Minn., one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, as a political target as Trump’s re-election campaign begins in earnest.
At issue were remarks that Omar made last month at an event hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. There, she gave a speech in which she addressed lingering fear directed at Muslims, and the rights Muslims have to speak out about being viewed with suspicion.
During the speech, she said that Muslims had “lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and, frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it.” She added that the council was created after the Sept. 11 attacks “because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.” (The Council on American-Islamic Relations was actually founded in 1994.)
Conservative news outlets and some Republican officials have focused on the words “some people did something,” arguing that Omar was playing down the attacks that killed more than 3,000 people and led to two wars. The video the president tweeted also focused on those four words from Omar’s speech.
A spokesman for Omar has said the speech was addressing civil rights.
Omar has already been the focus of threats, including one by a Trump supporter who was recently arrested.
Omar’s closest ally in the House, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., used Twitter to defend her colleague.
“Members of Congress have a duty to respond to the President’s explicit attack today,” she tweeted. “@IlhanMN’s life is in danger. For our colleagues to be silent is to be complicit in the outright, dangerous targeting of a member of Congress.”
Sen Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who is running for president as a Democrat, joined Ocasio-Cortez, as did 2020 presidential candidates Pete Buttigieg, Democratic mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.