But there they were, a video of Somali American kindergartners in blue caps and gowns during their promotion ceremony at their St. Paul, Minn., school, and again the same video punctuated by a comment from an anonymous right-wing account called “End Wokeness”: “Every girl is in a hijab… in kindergarten.” In the 14-second video, the children are singing an upbeat Somali educational song.
If Mr. Trump’s sharing of the video posts did not cause much national furor, they sent shudders through Minnesota’s large Muslim and Somali communities, whose members expressed indignation that the president was again vilifying them, and disbelief that he was doing so by targeting children.
“This was a red line,” said Khalid Omar, a community organizer with the interfaith group Isaiah and Faith, based in St. Paul. “Children who are just celebrating, and wanting to look like their mothers — forget about the hijab — who are just children enjoying themselves, seeing their families, singing. For him to go after those children, it’s awful, it’s dangerous, it’s inhumane, it’s wrong.”
For more than a year, Mr. Trump has relentlessly attacked Minnesota’s Somali community in a series of xenophobic tirades. He has disparaged Somali immigrants as “garbage” who should “go back to where they came from.” He has portrayed their children as a burden on schools. And he has demonized Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a Somali-born Democrat, including by mocking her hijab as a “little turban.”
Seizing on a welfare fraud scandal that was concentrated among Minnesota’s Somali community, his administration launched a immigration crackdown, threatened to cut federal child care funding and started investigations that a judge found were intended to “harass and retaliate against” Democratic officials in the state.
Even after all of that, Mr. Trump’s posts to his nearly 13 million followers on Monday still struck a particular nerve.
“He is a bigoted bully,” said James J. Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute. “He picks on vulnerable people — women, immigrants — but picking on 5-year-olds, it’s so low, even for him.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, declined repeated requests for comment on the president’s posts. Instead, she defended his previous statements about Somali schoolchildren burdening Minnesota’s public schools.
“President Trump is right,” Ms. Jackson said. “Aliens who come to our country, complain about how much they hate America, fail to contribute to our economy, rip off Americans and refuse to assimilate into our society should not be here. And nothing about that is racist.”
National civil rights organizations and state leaders added to local activists’ condemnation of the posts over the course of the week.
“I am no longer surprised when Donald Trump uses his platform to provoke attacks on Black, brown, or immigrant communities — but I am always disgusted,” said Keith Ellison, the state’s attorney general.
But on the other side, messages supporting Mr. Trump’s postings — in overwhelmingly racist, Islamophobic and anti-Muslim terms — also grew.
In response to the posts, Mr. Trump’s followers called the students “future terrorists” and said the children wearing hijabs were a “disgrace.” They called on him to “deport all Muslims” and to ban Islam. One account with more than a million followers declared that Mr. Trump had exposed a “terrifying reality” and that America was being “conquered.”
This is not the first time Mr. Trump has targeted Somali children.
In April of last year, Mr. Trump said: “You have states like Minnesota, where the school systems are collapsing under the weight of the refugee children, especially from Somalia.”
In November, he bemoaned “a vibrant beautiful community in Minneapolis, gone.”
“It’s not recognizable,” he said. “You have children that are going to school that don’t speak a word of English, they don’t speak a word of anything, and the teachers, they cry themselves to sleep.”
Mr. Trump has long used his social media account to amplify racist imagery and vilify immigrant groups. When he posted a racist video depicting former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama as apes this year, the backlash was so swift and bipartisan that Mr. Trump removed the post. (He refused to apologize and blamed it on an aide).
This week, Mr. Trump also posted a doctored image of the Obamas waving from Air Force One, which had graffiti that included the acronym “BLM” and Arabic writing. When he speaks about the former president, it is often using his middle name, Hussein.
Some critics of the posts noted that Mr. Trump has made combating anti-religious bias, particularly against Christians and Jews, a cornerstone of his second term. His recent posts, they said, make it clear that concern seems to apply only to certain groups.
State Senator Zaynab Mohamed, a Democrat who is the youngest woman ever elected to the Minnesota Senate and its first female Muslim member, said she did not believe that Mr. Trump would have posted the video if it showed any other religious group.
“Imagine if these kids were children who were wearing yarmulkes,” she said. “Imagine the reaction people would have. We would all be angry because we should be, because they are just as American as anyone else. And these kids who are wearing a hijab are just as American as the child who goes to a Catholic school that wears a particular uniform.”
National advocacy groups that have tracked the rise of Islamophobia said Mr. Trump’s posts were part of a trend of normalizing anti-Muslim hate and demeaning rhetoric that has led to violence and could lead to more.
A poll conducted last year by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding found that 63 percent of Muslims reported experiencing religious discrimination. And 47 percent of Muslims with children in grades K-12 reported that their children had been bullied for their religious identity in the past year, about twice the rate of the general population. Nearly half of the Muslim families whose children had been bullied said it was by an adult.
“This is the context within which Muslims have been living in the United States for a long time,” said Dr. Saher Selod, the director of research at the institute. “The bar has just been lowered so much in terms of what people can and cannot say about Muslims. We’re waiting for everyone to recognize how dehumanizing this is.”
Imam Yussuf Abdulle, the director of the Islamic Association of North America, which oversees more than three dozen Islamic centers and groups across the country, said that after the “garbage” comment, his young children asked him of Mr. Trump: “Baba, are we OK? What did we do to him? Does he hate us?”
He now knows the answer.
“Our president is not sparing our the most vulnerable of our community,” he said. “There’s no mercy for us in his heart.”
“What could make you happy, if not a kindergarten graduation?” he added. “If that makes you angry, there is no happiness left.”
But on that day, he said, the students captured the hope that the community still clings to in the United States.
The song, “I Am a Student,” speaks to cultural pride, educational success and collective responsibility.
I am a student, I am a student
I am the flower (hope) of this nation
I strive, I strive, I go to schools
So that I may repay the debt I owe my father and mother
With all the effort I bring, O Allah, help me, amen, amen
O Allah, support me, amen, amen
I am a student, I am a student, I am the light of the dawn
I run, I run, I go to take exams
So that I may gain knowledge, and benefit my country
With all the effort I bring, O Allah, help me, amen, amen
O Allah, support me, amen, amen.
Ernesto Londoño contributed reporting from Minneapolis.