Democrats are split on how best to counter President Donald Trump’s attempts to rally support for Republican candidates ahead of the midterms, specifically his recent focus on the Medicare fraud scandal carried out by members of the Somali community in Minnesota.

Typically, the parties in power suffer significant defeats in midterm elections, which would jeopardize Trump’s hopes of any legislative victories across the final two years of his term should the GOP fail to hold their slim majorities in both the House and Senate.

And with his polling taking a nose dive in recent months — the RealClearPolitics aggregate showed the president more than 11 points underwater heading into the weekend — the president has emptied the toolbox on initiatives clearly aimed at winning back goodwill from the electorate. 

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The bulk of his announcements have been affordability-focused, but Trump and his allies repeatedly highlighted the Minnesota scandal this past week in apparent attempts to center the narrative on immigration and crime, the two areas where Trump’s polling has dipped the least since January.

Republican operatives, including veterans of Trump’s three campaigns for the White House, tell the Washington Examiner that it’s no surprise the president lambasted Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) and other Minnesota Democrats in recent days.

“It’s the perfect storm. Unchecked migration. Crime. A retarded lib governor. Ilhan Omar,” one former Trump campaign aide who maintains close ties to the White House suggested. “There’s no way President Trump wasn’t going to go in here, but I do think this is a convenient opportunity to get the conversation back to where we’re comfortable. Which is that Joe Biden and Barack Obama let millions of illegal immigrants invade this country, and that it’s just as big of a problem for middle America as it is for border states.”

However, Democratic operatives are slow to say that Trump’s recent Minnesota push forces their hand in any way, suggesting that the Minnesota messaging won’t outweigh dissentiment with Trump’s deportation agenda, especially among Latino voters who backed Trump in 2024, and general affordability issues.

“My read on the situation is, people’s number one concern, overwhelmingly, is costs. That was the case a year ago. It is more the case today, because Trump and Washington Republicans have raised the prices that they promised to lower,” one former Biden White House official told the Washington Examiner. “That is still the main thing people want to hear about, and they know that he’s disrespecting them and not being straight with them.”

The person continued: “The billionaire president knows that his numbers are cratering, whatever he might say In Oval Office gaggles. They keep trying to target people because they seem to think that if American voters just see some kind of a spectacle that most of them do not like, that they will somehow forget that their costs have gone up while taxes for the rich have gone down.”

One veteran Democratic aide conceded “something does need to be done” to reform legal immigration, but doubted that, based on Republicans’ hyper-focus on Minnesota’s Somali community, this specific push will resonate with the national electorate the same way Trump’s rhetoric regarding illegal border crossings did last cycle.

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“I wish that we could revive the 2014 immigration debate because I think something does need to be done from a reform standpoint,” that person explained, adding they understand the political “strategy” Republicans are seeking to pursue. “The thing about the border security issue was it was so present. People see ‘fraud’ and Somalian immigrants, but it’s not like the images of people running across the border or through the Rio Grande. I’m always worried about the misuse of public dollars, but this is a little in the weeds.”

Minnesota’s Somali community totals some 80,000, the majority of whom have U.S. citizenship and were born in the country.

Though charges in the Minnesota fraud scandal began being publicized earlier this fall, the issue rose to the president’s desk late last week after the total number of indictments reached 80, with several schemes charged with defrauding roughly $1 billion over nearly a decade.

Over the weekend, Trump claimed on Truth Social that “Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for ‘prey’ as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone.”

“The seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both,” he continued, heaping additional blame on Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN).

On Wednesday, Trump signaled he would have ICE and the National Guard move in on Minnesota to target Somali migrants and said Omar herself should be deported.

“They have a representative, Ilhan Omar, who they say married her brother, that’s a fraud, she tries to deny it now, but you can’t really deny it because, you know, it just happened,” he claimed, adding that Omar “shouldn’t be allowed to be a congresswoman.”

“I’m sure people are looking at that, and she should be thrown the hell out of our country,” Trump concluded.

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Omar responded in an interview with MS NOW, asserting that Trump has “always been a racist, a bigot, xenophobic and Islamophobic.”

“It is not surprising that he is going after Black immigrants in this country,” she closed. “We are going to be here regardless of what the president has to say.