The White House has sparked outrage after an official account asked Representative Ilhan Omar why she ‘married her brother’.
Many have criticized the government for using official platforms to post things like this, but where does this strange conspiracy theory even come from in the first place?
Ilhan Omar has been a thorn in Donald Trump’s side from the start
It is absolutely no secret that Ilhan Omar and Donald Trump don’t get along.
The pair have clashed on countless occasions, represent opposing sides of the US political spectrum, and disagree on just about everything.
In recent times, Trump has made some scathing comments about Somalia - where Omar was born - and Somalians in America, name checking the Minnesota Congresswoman in the process.
Talking about the Somali diaspora in the USA, Trump said: “You look at what he's done with Somalia where Somalia, which is barely a country, they have no anything, they just run around killing each other.
“When I see somebody like Ilhan Omar, I always watch her, for years I've watched her complain about our Constitution ...”
Omar hit back at those comments, describing Trump’s ‘obsession’ with her as ‘creepy.
“I hope he gets the help he desperately needs,” she added.
However, the Rapid Response 47 account - dubbed the ‘Official White House Rapid Response Account’ on X, quipped back: “Why did you marry your brother?”
It sparked a huge row.
“I remember when the white house was associated with dignity,” read one comment.
“American government is using state social media accounts for these nonsense,” another said.
A third simply wrote: “Politics in 2025, what a time to be alive.”
Why on earth is this claim being made?
Let’s just start by saying that the claim is totally baseless and unverifiable by any metric.
Omar came to the USA in 1995 and still a child, and didn’t marry until much later.
This false rumor first came about in 2016 when she was running for Congress in Minnesota, and has been repeatedly used to troll her since.
According to online fact checkers Snopes, the origin is not clear.
Ilhan Omar. Credit: Leigh Vogel/Getty
It seems to have started via an unverified account on a forum - possibly as a joke - then was picked up by right-wing websites and spun around.
They said that Omar married her brother Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009, claiming that the marriage allowed him to come to the United States.
Omar herself has addressed the claims personally, stating that the whole strange rumor comes from ‘a difficult part of my personal history that I did not consider relevant in the context of a political campaign’ and added that claims she married her brother were ‘absurd and offensive’.
She was married in the Islamic faith to Ahmed Hirsi in 2002, although the couple never had an official marriage certificate, then after they separated she married British citizen Said Elmi, although they also separated in 2011 and he returned to England.
She then reconciled with Hirsi before the pair formally married in 2018.
Omar also pointed out that she fled conflict in Somalia and spent four years in a Kenyan refugee camp before arriving in the USA, providing documentation that showed her and her family - including siblings - entering the USA at that time.
The name Ahmed Our Said Elmi - purportedly three years younger than Omar, who is the youngest of her siblings - was not mentioned there.
Omar concluded: “For someone like me, who left a war-torn country at the age of eight, who got refugee status to come to America, where in the world am I finding a sibling 15 years, 20 years later to seek to do what people accuse me of?”