Don’t Fall For Trump’s Makeover. He’s an Anti-Muslim Bigot.
His cynical appeals to Muslim and Arab American voters can’t obscure a decade's worth of prejudice.
IN A CAMPAIGN FULL OF LIES, Donald Trump has come up with one of his most egregious whoppers yet: He’s telling Muslims and Arab Americans that he’ll protect them.
The truth is just the opposite. Trump is the worst anti-Muslim bigot ever nominated for president by a major party. And his record of persecuting Muslims is a grim indicator of what he might do to minorities if he regains power.
On Friday, at a rally in Traverse City, Michigan, Trump denounced Kamala Harris for campaigning with Liz Cheney. He used Cheney to link Harris to the Iraq war.
Why would Muslims support Kamala when she embraces Muslim-hating Liz Cheney? Can you believe [it]? Liz Cheney, a total loser whose father brought years of war and death to the Middle East. . . . Why would you be supporting somebody with the Cheney family? The father killed more Arabs than any human being on earth. He pushed Bush, and they went into the Middle East.
On Saturday, at a rally in Novi, Michigan, Trump escalated his attack. “Kamala is campaigning with Muslim-hating warmonger Liz Cheney, who wants to invade practically every Muslim country on the planet,” Trump lied. “The Muslims of our country, they see it, and they know it.”
Trump implied that he would end the war in Gaza. And he brought a few Muslim and Arab American Trump supporters onstage to attest that he had “promised to end war in the Middle East.”
None of this is true.
To begin with, Trump supported the Iraq war. In September 2002, Howard Stern asked him, “Are you for invading Iraq?” Trump replied, “Yeah, I guess so.” He expressed just one misgiving: “I wish the first time it was done correctly.”
Now Trump insists that he opposed the war—a falsehood he’s peddled throughout his time in politics. But he adds that when our forces were in Iraq, we should have plundered the country. Two weeks ago, he complained to an audience of businessmen that the Americans who managed the war ignored his advice to “keep the oil.”
Trump is also misrepresenting his record on Gaza. While Harris presses for a cease-fire, Trump has been telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “do what you have to do.” In fact, Trump has accused President Joe Biden of “trying to hold [Netanyahu] back.,” when we “should be doing the opposite.”
But Trump’s biggest lie is his pretense of protecting Muslims. Unlike Harris, who has never expressed animus against Muslims, Trump has a long record of Islamophobic bigotry.
In 2010, Trump used financial leverage to try to block construction of a Muslim community center near the site of the 9/11 terror attack in Manhattan. (The project had been denounced by many Republicans as a “Ground Zero mosque,” even though it was two blocks away from the 9/11 site and would only peripherally include a mosque.) Trump insisted that the project be moved further away.
In 2011, when Trump was thinking about running for president against Barack Obama, he insinuated that Obama was a secret Muslim and that this would be a strike against him. “He doesn’t have a birth certificate,” Trump told Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. “He may have one, but there’s something on that birth [certificate]. Maybe religion. Maybe it says he’s a Muslim.”
Four years later, when Trump ran for president, he explicitly called for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” He based this idea in part on security concerns. But he also warned Americans that Muslims “want to change your religion.” And he suggested that some mosques should be closed.
In March 2016, Trump told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that “Islam hates us.” Four months later, he argued that American Muslims were collectively responsible for Islamic terrorism and should be punished for it. “The people in the community know what’s going on, whether it’s in a mosque or whether it’s in the community,” he declared. He added: “If a community isn’t going to report when they know something’s going to happen, those people have to suffer the consequences.”
As president, Trump implemented a modified version of the proposed Muslim ban. (He toned it down after courts rejected a more stringent version.) The implemented version didn’t ban all Muslims, but it covered seven majority-Muslim countries. To this day, he has never apologized for his slurs or threats against Muslims.
In fact, Trump is still exploiting prejudice against Islam. In this year’s Republican presidential primaries, he attacked Nikki Haley for opposing his Muslim ban. And even now, at his campaign rallies, he routinely mocks Obama’s middle name, Hussein.
Two months ago, in a speech to the Israeli-American Council, Trump pledged to “bring back the travel ban.” He also vowed to “ban refugee resettlement from terror-infested areas like the Gaza Strip.” And in a dig at Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Trump implicitly smeared and derided Palestinians. “Chuck Schumer is a Palestinian,” Trump jeered. “I saw him the other day. He was dressed in one of their robes . . . Chuck Schumer is Hamas all the way.”
THAT’S THE REAL TRUMP: an unrepentant Islamophobic demagogue.
So why, in the final days of this campaign, is he posing as a protector of Muslims? And why in Michigan?
Because he knows Michigan has a big population of Muslims and Arab Americans. He knows those voters could swing the state to him—and with it, the election. Just last week, he bragged that Harris was “in freefall with Arab and Muslim voters. Now in Michigan, did you notice that my poll numbers are very good with the Arab voters? Did you see that?”
If Muslims fall for Trump’s ploy, it will be one of the saddest acts of political self-destruction by a minority group in this country’s history. Trump is a ruthless Islamophobic bigot. He demonstrated as a candidate and as president that he’s more than willing to use the power of the state against Muslims. And if circumstances in a second term make it politically advantageous to target some other minority, there’s no telling how far he’d go.