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Republicans roll the dice on anti-Muslim bigotry one more time
In the Trump era, there's no subtlety to the hate-mongering.
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Six days after the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington DC to send a message to the public that as the country prepared for what would become a decades-long Global War on Terror, Islam and Muslims were not the enemy.
“Islam is peace,” he said at a moment when Muslim Americans were experiencing a wave of intimidation and bigotry. “Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes. Moms who wear cover must be not intimidated in America. That’s not the America I know. That’s not the America I value.”
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Given the way that long war was prosecuted both at home and abroad, one can question Bush’s sincerity on this point — and much of his party never agreed. Nevertheless, the fact that the president reinforced foundational notions of pluralism and religious liberty at such a fraught moment showed that a principled opposition to anti-Muslim bigotry still existed within the Republican Party.
Back then, supposedly serious people argued that radical Muslim terrorists represented a genuine threat to the safety of all Americans, something almost no one claims any longer. Yet today, naked statements of animus toward Muslims — all Muslims — are not only more accepted than ever within the Republican Party, they’re coming right from the White House.
Now the alleged threat is less about safety than about culture and power: Let American Muslims have truly full citizenship — including the ability to serve in public office — and the country’s character will be contaminated.
This latest wave of bigotry started when Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York last year, and has accelerated since Abdul El-Sayed won the primary for a Senate seat from Michigan. Whatever hesitation there was to tolerate the ugliest statements of racial and religious prejudice from Republican officeholders and advocates has disappeared.
But as shocked and disgusted as we should all be at what we are hearing, and as powerful as racism and religious hatred continue to be, there’s good reason to believe there are limits to the effectiveness of these attacks.
The veil is off — if it was ever on
The mainstreaming of bigotry is one of the central pillars of Donald Trump’s political project, and has been from the beginning.
Trump turned himself from a gossip-pages fixture and reality show star into a political figure by becoming the nation’s foremost advocate of the racist “birther” theory which said th