Jalale is a Minnesotan, originally from Ethiopia, and a Trump supporter who loves her MAGA hat. She has been thrown out of a restaurant, assaulted, called a "coon" and dumped by her boyfriend for being a Trump supporter. But she isn’t backing down. My kind of girl.
Jalale is a legal immigrant. She came to the United States in 1996 while in the fifth grade from her native Ethiopia. “I grew up in a communist country. I know what real fascism and communism is, and when I see little girls saying America is a fascist country, I say, you have no idea.”
Back in Ethiopia, she says, both her father and uncle had been jailed for practicing Christianity and teaching it in the wrong language. Her father, a pastor, came to the United States to start his own church. Earlier this summer, the new Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, a man Jalale describes as a Trump-esque reformer, came to the U.S. and met with Vice President Pence. He also made a stop in Minnesota, and before speaking to a crowd of Ethiopian immigrants there while Jalale’s father delivered a prayer.
Jalale grew up in a large, conservative, Christian family, values she retained until going away to college, where she says her brain became warped by the suffocating atmosphere of liberalism surrounding her. “I flipped completely after college to being liberal,” she says. “I forgot who I was. I forgot what made me the hardworking person I had been all along. I came out of college disillusioned, not hopeful about the future, and hating people in general. It’s really hard to remember what made me change back, but the moment I saw things for what they were, which was less than a year ago, I could never go back."
I'm glad she's back. Welcome home.
