Donald Trump’s defeat in the US election was widely predicted, but what was less anticipated was the level of support Trump received from Muslim voters, a third of whom backed him, according to the AP VoteCast survey. It seems many Muslim voters reflected on Trump’s tumultuous time in office and liked what they saw: there was an almost three-fold increase in the number of Muslim voters who turned out for Trump compared to 2016. This marks a stark contrast to Barack Obama and George W Bush, who lost a significant chunk of these voters after their first stints at the White House. So what happened?
Over the past four years, Trump has gone from declaring that ‘Islam hates us’, asking for a sweeping ban on Muslims entering the US, to issuing an executive order preventing people from seven Muslim-majority states from coming to the country. Trump’s unbridled rhetoric on Islam and Muslims led to his depiction in the media as an ‘Islamophobe’. This
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