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Islamophobia is getting louder. Why isn’t the response?

The Islamophobic attacks on Ilhan Omar and Abdul El-Sayed won’t stop with them.

Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. Let’s get into it.

One thing I’m thinking about: Electability and identity are intertwined

On Sunday, former President Barack Obama did something most others seemed to avoid: He called out the Trump administration’s targeting of Rep. Ilhan Omar.

The administration, Obama wrote, is “actively trying to deport Congresswoman Omar” over a theory he called unsubstantiated: that she was 18, not 17, when her father was naturalized. The effort, he said, “should outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about Congresswoman Omar’s political views.”

The statement stands in contrast to the mixed response of Democrats on the campaign trail and the relative silence of the mainstream press. House leadership put out a statement condemning the raid — but there’s been nothing from Senate Democratic leadership and little from the crop of elected officials expected to run for president in 2028.

The Midterms, Actually

Astead W. Herndon’s weekly guide to the big ideas and key people behind the political shifts shaping the 2026 elections.

As The Intercept’s Adam Johnson pointed out, the August 2025 raid on former Trump adviser John Bolton drew scathing editorials from the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal within days. The same goes for other ways Trump has weaponized the federal government against his political enemies, from the cases against James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James to the pursuit of Federal Reserve officials (Obama named all three in his statement). Omar’s raid has drawn much less intense coverage. Last week, I got three requests from cable outlets to discuss “news of the day” — each mentioned fired White House press secretary Katie Zacharia, new midterms polling, and some combination of Pete Hegseth and the war with Iran. None mentioned Omar.

The entire episode has reminded me of Trump’s targeting of Black journalists like Don Lemon and Georgia Fort. Earlier this year, they were indicted after covering an anti-ICE protest that disrupted a service at Cities Church in St. Paul, and both have pleaded not guilty. In that case, there was also a muted reaction from the establishment press, possibly because of mixed feelings about Lemon personally or the lack of solidarity with independent Black media. Still, that silence was shortsighted, as the Trump administration used the incident as a stepping stone to target the wider media apparatus (See: Trump’s September attempt to bar CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House).

With that in mind, I don’t think it’s hard to guess why Omar hasn’t received the fulsome backing of her party. I don’t think it’s the merits of the case: She hasn’t been charged with a crime, and the theory depends on a decades-old immigration filing by a father who died in 2020. It’s likely the fact that the Minnesota progressive has herself had a tense relationship with the Democratic establishment. That dates back to the 2019 fight over comments Omar made about the influence of the pro-Israel lobby in Congress, which some took to be antisemitic. In recent weeks, Minnesota Democrats, including Rep. Angie Craig and Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s office, criticized Omar’s plans to appear at an October 26 event hosted by state Sen. Omar Fateh with Hasan Piker, the controversial........

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