Republicans roll the dice on anti-Muslim bigotry one more time

In the Trump era, there's no subtlety to the hate-mongering.

Mike Rogers and his wife in their fear-mongering video about El-Sayed.

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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 that Barack Obama was not in fact an American citizen. Then he announced his presidential run with an ugly speech claiming that immigrants from Mexico were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” and that the threat originated from non-white countries around the world.

There has barely been a day since when Trump was not working to destroy America’s commitment to pluralism, to not only make the country whiter by deporting and restricting immigration from non-white immigrants, but by dismantling any systems and programs that might even acknowledge racism, let alone ameliorate it. And here’s what he posted to Truth Social on Saturday:

On the left you see the president with his third wife, a model from Slovenia who somehow managed to acquire a green card on the exclusive EB-1 program, informally known as the “Einstein visa” since it is reserved for immigrants of extraordinary ability. On the right you see Abdul El-Sayed with his American-born wife, a psychiatrist from Michigan.

You’ll also notice that just as Republicans refer to “Barack Hussein Obama” when they want to make the former president sound alien and threatening, the party has decided in its official communications to use Abdul El-Sayed’s full name when referring to him. And while they deny that the purpose is to play on hate and fear, they can’t be bothered to come up with a plausible alternate explanation.

This new forthrightness about their efforts to promote hate is something of a reversal from a historical trajectory Republicans were on before Trump took over their party.

It was decades ago that GOP strategist Lee Atwater explained how the party’s language had moderated over time, from using the N-word to referring instead to “forced busing” and “states’ rights,” to “welfare queens.” The objective — activating racism to win votes — was the same, but the tools were altered to adapt to changes in the broader culture.

That evolution was necessary not only because of what had become socially unacceptable for candidates and parties to say, but because of a realization that voters needed to justify their own decisions to themselves. Do your race-baiting with a bit of subtlety, and voters would reject Democrats on racial grounds but tell themselves it was really about their concern for substantive issues — as though Willie Horton was just about criminal justice policy.

But there is no subtlety in the Trump era.

Just as his is a proudly white supremacist administration, MAGA Republicans are now saying straightforwardly that Muslims are not real Americans and no Muslims should be allowed to hold public office.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, who is currently running for governor and favored to win, has said that “Islam is not a religion. It’s a cult … We’ve got to SEND THEM HOME NOW or we’ll become the United Caliphate of America.” When Mayor Mamdani hosted a Ramadan celebration, Tuberville posted a picture of the event alongside a shot of the 9/11 attacks, and captioned it “the enemy is inside the gates.”

Rep. Brandon Gill posted a picture of the Ramadan gathering and called it “Stomach churning. Truly repulsive.”

It goes on.

Earlier this year, Rep. Randy Fine of Florida tweeted “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” Rep. Andy Ogles posted on X in March that “Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie.” Asked about it, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said that while Ogles had deployed “a different language than I would use,” nevertheless “there’s a lot of energy in the country and a lot of popular sentiment that the demand to impose Shariah law in America is a serious problem.”

Johnson knows perfectly well that no one is trying to impose Sharia law on the United States, but built into this kind of hate-mongering is the idea that American Muslims are not really American, but are attempting to force an alien ideology on the rest of us. As Rep. Nancy Mace, who recently lost a bid to become South Carolina governor, tweeted last week, “Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic.”

Late last year, far-right Republicans in the House formed the Sharia-Free America Caucus; it now claims at least 60 members. The recent Republican primary season in Texas turned into a frenzy of hatemongering in which conservative Republicans accused each other of being insufficiently hostile to Muslims in the state.

At a moment when the GOP’s leader is spectacularly unpopular and the public is losing whatever faith it might have had in its ability to govern effectively (especially on the economy), significant portions of the party clearly believe that fomenting anti-Muslim bigotry can help them mitigate their losses in the midterms.

Does this stuff still work?

If he is elected, Abdul El-Sayed would be the first Muslim to serve in the United States Senate.

While a small number of Muslims have been elected to the House, they all hail from heavily Democratic districts, so they don’t offer much insight into how a Muslim candidate’s religion will affect their ability to win statewide. Obviously, there is plenty of prejudice still around — but it’s far more prevalent among Republican voters, most of whom won’t be voting for any Democrat.

One illustrative campaign just occurred in the closely divided 8th district of Michigan. One candidate, a Navy veteran, seemed on a glide path to the nomination when not only did he get President Trump’s endorsement, his opponent suspended his campaign. Trouble was, the Trump-endorsed candidate was named Amir Hassan, and the guy who all but dropped out was named Tom Smith. Despite no longer campaigning, Smith won 50 percent of the vote to Hassan’s 33 percent. Hassan is a Christian; it’s hard to believe he would have gotten Trump’s endorsement otherwise. But his name was clearly too much to overcome.

In that House primary, most voters had likely barely heard of the candidates, which will not be the case with Abdul El-Sayed. It would be foolish to assume that El-Sayed’s name won’t carry a penalty, but how big of one is unclear. One 2024 poll from the University of Maryland found that 57 percent of Republicans said they wouldn’t vote for a Muslim presidential candidate they agreed with on the issues, compared to 27 percent of independents and 16 percent of Democrats. But the combination of El-Sayed’s charisma and the fact that his populist message is perfectly timed for this moment may mean that he can overcome the hurdle.

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There is also a possibility that the Republicans’ blatant bigotry will backfire on them — not among bigots, but among voters who are both uncomfortable with Muslims and uncomfortable with the idea that they’d vote against a candidate just because he’s a Muslim. If Republicans make the racism of their appeal impossible to ignore, at least some of those conflicted voters may react against the GOP’s campaign and convince themselves that El-Sayed is “one of the good ones,” and they can support him at least this once.

This campaign is the latest expression of the right’s eagerness to reject American pluralism — and their faith that the majority of voters share that goal and will respond to appeals to bigotry. They certainly have reason to believe that what worked before can work again. And they can be counted on to go too far — so far that even some voters who might otherwise have supported them are repulsed.

It’s worth noting that in the deep-red district in Tennessee he represents, Andy Ogles just lost his own primary to another Republican, one who is plenty conservative but not so flamboyantly bigoted. So while a Muslim name may carry a penalty, so does acting too much like Donald Trump.

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