A 2025 video of James Carville urging Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) to leave the Democratic Party over a years-old comment she made about white men has resurfaced after the congresswoman’s behavior at Tuesday’s State of the Union address.
“Lady, why don’t you just get out of the Democratic Party,” Carville said of Omar on May 7, 2025, during a Politics War Room with James Carville and Al Hunt session. “Honestly, start your own movement.”
Carville was responding to Omar’s February 2018 interview with Al Jazeera, during which the then-congressional candidate argued that “our country should be more fearful of white men because they’re causing most of the deaths within this country.”
Carville, the mastermind of President Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and a longtime Democratic consultant, highlighted Omar’s comments and suggested his party might need to “schism” with the progressive left. He said the “simple math” is that a majority of voters are white and male.
“Now we’re going to have a campaign by the progressive left against white men who vote about a third of everybody that votes in every election,” Carville said. “Why don’t you, lady, start your own party? And then when it’s over, if you want to caucus with Democrats, fine.”
“We agree with a lot of things that you do, but we don’t believe we ought to be running against white men,” he added.
Omar and a fellow progressive, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), heckled President Donald Trump at multiple points during his State of the Union address on Tuesday. Trump clapped back on Wednesday, calling for Omar and Tlaib to be “institutionalized.”
“When you watch Low IQ Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, as they screamed uncontrollably last night at the very elegant State of the Union, such an important and beautiful event, they had the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people, LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick who, frankly, look like they should be institutionalized,” he wrote on Truth Social.
Carville continued by describing progressives like Omar as “helpless.”
“Fact, we don’t think we ought to be running against any gender, any ethnic group, any race, any religion, or anything else,” Carville said. “[Progressives] cannot be helped and [there is] nothing you can do to help them, they don’t want to be helped.”
“If they had any guts, they would start their own goddamn political party and get out of ours,” he added.