Jesus was born among the kind of people Donald Trump calls ‘garbage’

On Dec. 2, President Donald Trump gathered his top officials at the White House for a televised cabinet meeting during which he called the people of Somalia in general and Representative Ilhan Omar specifically ‘garbage.’ He warned Americans that the country “could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking garbage into our country.” According to Mr. Trump, Somalis “should go back to where they came from” because they are “people who don’t work,” who “just run around killing each other” whose “country is no good for a reason.” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noam encouraged the President to enact “a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches and entitlement junkies.”

Much has happened since then. Horrific mass killings of students at Brown University and of Jewish worshippers in Bondi Beach Australia. We’ve watched videos of the government blowing up fishing boats in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. A beloved moviemaker and his wife were murdered in their home, allegedly by their own troubled son. People are being flooded out of their homes in Washington State and, unfathomably, out of their tents in the refugee camps of Gaza. With so much violence, death and suffering, I wonder why my heart is so troubled by the racist words of our President. His remarks barely made a blip in the news cycle. The world has moved on. Even the prime minister of Somalia urged people to ignore the President’s remarks, arguing that responding to his comments gives them more prominence and noting wryly that “we are not the only country that Trump insults.”

But as a pastor preparing to celebrate Christmas, I can’t ignore Trump’s racist lies. Because they’re blasphemy. Genesis, the first book of the Bible, tells the story of creation which begins with the word of God. Day by cosmic day, God speaks creation into existence, calling forth light and land, oceans below and heavens above, plants and animals until on the 6th day God creates humanity. People, we learn, are different from all that has come before, because God made them “in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” God looks with delight on all that has been made and definitively declares it not just good, but “very good.”

Scripture teaches that all people are made in the image of God. Theologians have an ancient name for this, the “imageo dei.” It means that each person is indelibly stamped with the image of the living God and so every life holds intrinsic sacred worth. When Trump calls Somalis garbage, he is calling God a creator of garbage. Trump thinks he’s insulting Somalis, and he is, but he is also insulting God who created Somalis in God’s own image. After creating them, God blesses the newly made humans and commissions them to “be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” Like many Americans, Donald Trump believes that the United States is both the center and hope of the world, but Genesis teaches that God is. No place on earth is God-forsaken. No one made in the image of God is garbage.

As Christians light Advent candles and set up nativity scenes in anticipation of Christmas, it is important to remember that the story of Jesus doesn’t begin with his birth or even the angelic revelation to his parents. The Gospel of John begins with the declaration that Jesus is the word of God through which “all things were made and without him nothing was made that has been made.” Jesus “was with God in the beginning” because he is the word spoken by God which spun creation out of chaos. On Christmas Eve, we will gather to worship and light the Christ candle and declare that in Jesus “was life and that life was the light of all humanity.”

At Christmas, we celebrate the incarnation, the Son of God being born, not among a rich, powerful and privileged people, but among the poor, powerless and dispossessed. Jesus was born in the kind of place and among the kind of people our President calls garbage. Those who call Jesus savior will never normalize or rationalize language that dehumanizes those created in his image and desecrates the world he came to save. Kate Murphy is pastor at The Grove Presbyterian Church in Charlotte and author of “Lost, Hidden, Small.”

This story was originally published in The News and Observer, December 24, 2025 at 5:53 AM.