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.

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/08/donald-trump-america-muslim-

citizens