Trump has been on a racist lunatic rant at Davos calling Africans “low-IQ” and mocking Somalia as a “failed state” while his own key advisor’s firm actively supported the dictator who destroyed it.

The people who took money to whitewash Somalia’s destruction now blame Somalis for their “failed culture.” Trump’s inner circle profited from enabling Somalia’s destruction, hid the evidence, and now mocks Somalis for the wreckage.

Some of us remember. Barre was overthrown in 1991. His regime collapsed. The obvious dictator pattern was seen there, destruction followed by collapse. The question today, just like 1989, isn’t whether authoritarian consolidation by Team Trump fails—it’s how much damage it inflicts before it does.

Flashback to a Trump advisor’s own words, when he was expressing the rules don’t apply to them:

We all know [the dictator of Somalia] Barre is a bad guy, Riva. We just have to make sure he is our bad guy.

This was from Paul Manafort, on assignment in 1989:

…to clean up Siad Barre’s international reputation, which needed plenty of soap.

Manafort was referring to Somalia’s dictator killing an estimated 200,000 Isaaq tribe members. The destruction of Hargeisa was so total that it earned the nickname “the Dresden of Africa.” The UN concluded it was genocide. The future Trump team advisor concluded he could make it disappear in a PR campaign.

Some of us remember. Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly were known as the “torturers’ lobby” for representing so many corrupt dictators involved in human rights abuses. Trump is merely the latest addition to their list. Stone, who continues to orbit Trump, was a founding partner. Even if you didn’t know about the Barre connections, surely you knew that Manafort also worked for Suharto in Indonesia?

The mainstream coverage of Trump at Davos completely misses how damning the historical record is for him. He wasn’t just calling Africans dumb, he mocked those who pay his team to help them.

Meanwhile, Israel just landed the first diplomatic recognition of Somaliland. The region Trump dismisses as worthless has become strategically essential to replace American military presence after Hegseth’s humiliating failures in the Red Sea.

Trump’s team broke Somalia, buried the evidence, mocks the victims, and now depends on the region they destroyed to compensate for their own military incompetence.

Somalia’s dictator paid Manafort a million dollars to bury genocide. Decades later, Trump invokes that as proof Somalis are the ones with “low IQ.”