Hold on a minute! Ill get to this introduction to TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon's latest superb piece as soon as I take the garbage down to the basement. Oh, wait, I cant carry a Somali (no less congressional representative Ilhan Omar!) even to the elevator all by myself. Maybe Donald Trump can help me. After all, he was the one who insisted that Somali immigrants contribute nothing. I don't want them in our country, Ill be honest with you. And after terming Omar like those other Somali immigrants garbage, he added, were going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but b*tch, we don't want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.
In the meantime, of course, President Trump, with the aid of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and all too many others in his administration, is working hard to get rid not just of the garbage in Minnesota Minneapolis being home to the largest population of Somali immigrants in this country but in the Caribbean Sea, too (literally, blowing it out of the water).
And that is, unfortunately, likely to just be the beginning for our ever more unnerving and historically racist president. Unfortunately (again!), for the next three years, barring a surprise, there is, it seems, no way to take the actual garbage out of the White House, although, as Rep. Omar recently put it all too accurately: The president knows he is failing, and so he is reverting to what he knows best: trying to divert attention by stoking bigotry. And let me just quote her at greater length from a recent New York Times op-ed of hers: This comment was only the latest in a series of remarks and Truth Social posts in which the president has demonized and spread conspiracy theories about the Somali community and about me personally. For years, the president has spewed hate speech in an effort to gin up contempt against me. He reaches for the same playbook of racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and division again and again. At one 2019 rally, he egged on his crowd until it chanted send her back when he said my name. And, of course, hes still doing it.
Yes, indeed, that is our garbage president to a T. And with that in mind, let Rebecca Gordon take you to that shithole country Sudan and remind us that the world out there, whatever its own horrific problems, still has a few lessons to teach us as we try to get ready to take out the presidential garbage in November 2026 and 2028. Tom
Surprising Lessons for the U.S. Resistance to Trump
In Sudan's Recent History
Follow a line south and west from the Gaza Strip, continue through Egypt, and you'll end up in another place where a genocide is in progress. Its one we don't hear much about in the United States, probably because its happening in an African nation, one of those places Donald Trump refers to as shithole countries. (Interestingly, another of the places he included under that designation during his first term in office was El Salvador, which is run by his new BDF Best Dictator Friend Nayib Bukele. Nothing like providing access to your national torture center to get you back on Trumps A-list, I guess.)
The place I'm talking about is the nation directly south of Egypt and across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia: Sudan. Its big the 15th-largest country in the world and the third-largest in Africa with an area a quarter the size of the United States and around 50 million inhabitants. Its name derives from the Arabic for Land of the Blacks. The population is 70% Arab, with the remainder being mostly of northern and eastern African descent.
Right now, about 45% of those people, 21.2 million of them, are facing the highest levels of acute food insecurity, according to the U.N.s World Food Program. Famine has been confirmed in at least two Sudanese cities, with 20 other areas on the verge of it. And the situation is only expected to worsen next year, as what food stocks exist dry up and the fighting that has ravaged the country since 2019 continues. At least 12 million people have been displaced. To put that in perspective: compared to the ongoing genocide two countries to the north, the number of starving people in Sudan is 10 times the entire population of Gaza, while the number of displaced Sudanese is almost six times that number.
In addition to presenting the worlds worst humanitarian crisis, I suspect the situation in Sudan holds an important warning for the movement opposing Donald Trump in this country. But more on that later.
Where Is the Coverage?
Like many people, Ive spent the years since Hamas's October 2023 attack on Israel watching the buildings fall down and bodies pile up in Gaza, even as I kept wishing that the U.S. media would do a better job of describing what was happening there. In the spring of 2024, while American college students risked expulsion and deportation to raise hell about the genocide already underway in Gaza, the New York Times told its journalists to look the other way, as the Intercept reported, restricting the use of terms like genocide, ethnic cleansing, occupied territory, and even Palestine.
By December 2024, the Times was doing better. It covered Amnesty Internationals 296-page report accusing Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza, despite, in the story's first sentence, reporting that the accusation had drawn a rebuke from Israeli officials who denied the claim. Unfortunately, that story appeared not on the front page of its print edition, but on page eight. By July 2025, the paper was no longer afraid to use the G word or run a string of stories and op-eds, including coverage of the U.N.s determination that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians.
All in all, however, the major U.S. media were slow to recognize the horror unfolding in Gaza. Even now, their coverage of Donald Trumps and Benjamin Netanyahu's peace plan remains disturbingly credulous.
But if the media were slow to acknowledge an unfolding genocide in Gaza, they have given far less coverage to the one developing in Sudan. An important exception is the work of the Times's chief African correspondent Declan Walsh who, along with Times staffers, won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for his work on Sudan. Too bad so many of his articles initially appeared not on the front page but inside the papers print edition.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
