Donald Trump Muslim Citizens Don’t Exist
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Transcript of Donald Trump Muslim Citizens Don’t Exist
Donald Trump has made it clear: in his
America, Muslim citizens don’t exist
The 2016 American presidential election has been an absurd,
exhausting and bruising spectacle. Now imagine living through it
all as a Muslim American. Somehow, this election has managed
to cram all the Islamophobic sentiments of the last 15 years into
the span of 15 months, and then morph them into one ugly thing.
Donald Trump is largely to blame. He called for “a total and
complete shutdown of Muslims” entering the country until it
became clear that the proposal was embarrassingly ill-
conceived, only to be replaced by the equally vague “extreme
vetting”. He fought publicly with the Gold Star Khan family,
suggesting Ghazala Khan was not “allowed to speak” at the
Democratic convention because of her Muslim faith. He accused
Muslim Americans as a group of harboring terrorists. There’s
more, but we all know the story by now.
A Muslim woman was set on fire in
New York. Now just going out
requires courage
Trump has insulted and defamed many different groups along
the way, but what we may not realize is how it’s different when it
comes to Muslims. Over the course of the campaign, Trump has
very publicly reached out to Latino, African American and
LGBTQ voters to ask for their support. We can question his
sincerity, but the gestures are there. He even briefly tempered his
tone regarding Mexicans during a quickly arranged visit to
President Enrique Peña Nieto in Mexico City last August.
His daughter Ivanka and wife Melania have defended him for his
unforgivable behavior toward women, and Ivanka also recorded
an official campaign television advertisement openly courting
women voters for her father. Trump denies the charge he
mocked a disabled reporter, and despite a bevy of antisemitic
incidents involving Trump and his supporters over the past
months, he has also directly sought Jewish American support.
Such is his style of leadership: he may insult you, but he still wants
your vote.
Not so with the Muslims. A tiny handful of Muslim Americans may,
bizarrely, be Trump supporters, but that doesn’t diminish the fact
that, while attempting to engage every other constituency,
Trump’s campaign has made essentially zero public outreach to
the Muslim electorate. It’s as if Muslim citizens already don’t exist
in Trump’s America.
The irony is that Trump’s willful blindness to Muslim voters may
lead to his defeat. Muslims may only account for a small part of
the American population, but a concerted push by Muslim
Americans during this season has meant that there are now over
a million registered Muslim voters, more than double the number
in 2012. And Muslims tend to live in key battleground states such
as Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Virginia.
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But Hillary Clinton may not be able to count on all of those votes
either. Many Muslim Americans have long been uncomfortable
with her hawkish foreign policy record and her superficially
inclusive rhetoric. “We need American Muslims to be part of our
eyes and ears on our frontlines,” is a standard Clinton refrain, and
with it we hear the suggestion that our communities live on some
kind of “frontline” of warfare.
This is so not true: the front line of Costco, maybe. Most Muslim
Americans are boring, middle-class folk. Clinton also seems to
see Muslim Americans as separate from her idea of “we” (“we”
need “them” to be part of “us”) and to believe that we, as a
group, carry some insider knowledge about evildoers that we
may – or may not! – be willing to trade in exchange for equal
treatment in the United States.
This is offensive to our citizenship, and Muslim Americans must be
afforded the same rights and protections as everyone else
without precondition. But what this campaign has really shown is
how contested and precarious the place is for Muslim Americans
today. That won’t change after 8 November, regardless of who
wins.
Even with a Clinton victory, Trump and his “movement”, which is
how he refers to his campaign, will not simply vanish. And the
suggestion that Trump is merely using the election as a platform
from which to start a new media empire is hardly comforting, as if
there has never been a connection between mass media and
far-right politics. So how prepared are we, as a nation, to deal
with Trumpism after Tuesday?
How we learned all the wrong
lessons from 9/11
If there’s any good news to come out of this election, it’s that the
country now recognizes the potent political force that is
Islamophobia. And Americans are beginning to understand that
fighting anti-Muslim bigotry is not fundamentally about
protecting Muslims, but about preserving the vision of a
functioning, pluralistic and democratic society. Now we must be
prepared to do the work necessary to hold our leaders to that
standard every day, and not just once every four years.
Since you’re here…
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/08/donald-trump-america-muslim-
citizens