What Muslim Ban? Trump Tries to Sidestep Years of Islamophobia.
The New York Times
Former President Donald J. Trump is trying to persuade a potentially decisive group of Arab and Muslim voters that they should vote for him, even though he has spent years insulting and demonizing them.
Last month, former President Donald J. Trump was still promising to reinstate what he called his “famous travel ban” on some Muslim countries. He falsely claimed over the summer that Vice President Kamala Harris “wants to deposit thousands of jihadist sympathizers in Minnesota.” And he said Democrats have a plan to “turn the Midwest into the Middle East.”
The anti-Muslim scaremongering is a cornerstone of Mr. Trump’s political identity, dating back at least to his 2016 campaign when he said he would create a registry of Muslims and embraced an apocryphal story about Gen. John J. Pershing executing Muslim rebels in the Philippines with bullets dipped in pig fat.
But in the final stretch of the presidential race, Mr. Trump is trying to persuade a potentially decisive group of Arab and Muslim voters that they should vote for him, even though he has spent years insulting and demonizing them.
“I have many friends who are Arab,” the former president said last week in an interview on Al-Arabiya, an Arabic-language TV channel. “They’re very warm people. It’s a shame what’s happening over there. They’re the warmest people.”
During a rally on Saturday in Michigan, a crucial swing state with a sizable Arab and Muslim population, he told the crowd that he had met a group of the community’s leaders earlier in the day. “You know what they want?” he asked. “They want peace. They’re great people.”
