When President Donald Trump demanded on Thursday that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) face an immediate investigation into her purported “Financial and Political Crimes,” he was apparently responding to a Fox News host smearing the congresswoman on TV.
Fox’s Jesse Watters suggested the need for federal investigations of Omar and several other Minnesota Democrats on The Five, saying at 5:22 p.m. ET of the congresswoman, “All of a sudden, $30 million winds up in her bank account."
Watters was promoting a right-wing falsehood that Omar’s financial disclosure showed her net worth climbed to $30 million after she took office in 2019 because she is corrupt; in reality, the jump in her household net worth resulted from her 2020 marriage to political consultant and entrepreneur Timothy Mynett, whose businesses were subsequently listed at estimated values ranging up to that figure on Omar’s disclosure forms.
(The Fox host isn’t known for his intellect, but he can surely understand that when he divorced the mother of his first two children and married the Fox producer with whom he had begun an affair while she was working on his show, the household net worth of the latter increased by virtue of becoming Mrs. Jesse Watters.)
Trump is an inveterate Fox viewer, and was apparently watching The Five from Davos, Switzerland, where he was rupturing U.S. alliances at the World Economic Forum and threatening reprisals against various domestic enemies on social media.
Twelve minutes after Watters attacked Omar, Trump used the same claim about her wealth to demand an investigation. “Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is worth over $30 Million Dollars,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. “There is no way such wealth could have been accumulated, legally, while being paid the salary of a politician. She should be investigated for Financial and Political Crimes, and that investigation should start, NOW!”
Trump, who presumably boosted the household net worths of all three of his wives, has also “accumulated” dramatically more wealth “while being paid the salary of a politician” during his second term. The New York Times editorial board reports that Trump “has used the office of the presidency to make at least $1.4 billion,” with sales of his family’s cryptocurrency — which “people who hope to influence federal policy, including foreigners” can purchase to secretly put money in the Trumps’ pockets — serving as “by far his biggest moneymaker.”
The president frequently posts in response to Fox segments that catch his eye and often takes action in response. That “Trump-Fox feedback loop” has repeatedly led to federal criminal investigations into the political enemies he’s seen targeted on Fox. Those probes typically fizzled during his first term. In his second term, however, the officials making the investigative and prosecutorial decisions are often partisans who have spent years ensconced in the same right-wing media bubble, increasing the authoritarian threat posed by Trump’s television.
