The Trump theory of El-Sayed holds that his ascendance is being facilitated by the machinations of Wayne County, a “strictly Third World” jurisdiction that seeks to elevate to Congress a “jihadist” who shouldn’t even be eligible for “a seat on an airplane.” If seated in the world’s greatest deliberative body, El-Sayed, the theory holds, would execute his dastardly plan to ban Christmas and—you guessed it—impose Sharia law.
Trump’s attacks have been echoed and amplified by right-wing news outlets like Newsmax, which has lambasted El-Sayed as an “anti-Israel Muslim,” an “immigrant from another Muslim country,” and a Midwest variant of that other alien, Zohran Mamdani, the “socialist Muslim who’s always smiling.” For those too dense to catch the message, the Newsmax chyrons have helpfully driven home the point—“THE LEFT IS FORGETTING THE HEINOUS ATTACKS OF 9/11,” “DEMOCRATS DROOL OVER NON-WHITE SOCIALISTS,” “MUSLIMS TELL US THEY’RE TAKING OVER, AND THEY ARE.”
Lest one think that this bigotry is merely limited to the crude ramblings of unlettered ogres, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has stepped in to offer some intellectual heft to the attack. The Muslim Brotherhood, according to Kennedy, is responsible for not just the menace that is El-Sayed, but also the dark age that has fallen over the entirety of the Arabdom. “There’s 500 million Arabs in the world,” Kennedy claimed, “and yet they don’t produce science, they don’t win the Nobel Prize, they don’t win the Field[s] prize, they don’t win the Wolf Prize, they don’t produce the literature they used to produce.”
Again, facts aren’t really the point here, and there is no wisdom in debating a quack whose brain has literally been infected by a worm. Nonetheless, it is worth noting the particular history at work. During both his run for president and his time in the White House, Barack Obama endured his share of racist attacks. To Rush Limbaugh, Obama was “Barack the Magic Negro.” To Newt Gingrich, he was America’s “food stamp president.” At the Value Voters Summit, a vendor hawked “Obama Waffles,” a product featuring a racist caricature of the president on the packaging. The tagline was: “Point box toward Mecca for tastier waffles.” That last line deserves particular attention. Indeed, by 2016, the political scientist Philip Klinkner would find that the best way to discern whom a voter would support in the upcoming election was to pose a simple question—“Is Barack Obama a Muslim?”