How Republicans became the anti-Islam party

Ilhan Omar will come up a lot in the 2020 US election. She’s part of the ‘Democratic Squad’ of congresswomen that Republicans hate, along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — but she outshines them all by being a foreign-born hijabi who supports boycotting Israel and is accused of immigration fraud. If Donald Trump goes after Omar, it’ll polarise Democrats around her and conservatives around him, which is the role that Islam seems condemned to play in American politics: a trigger word to whip up the base. It prompts the question, why are Trump supporters so scared of Islam? And are their fears justified?

It’s easy to slot this prejudice into centuries of irrational panic about immigrants and outsiders, from the Irish, Jews and Japanese to Germans like Trump’s paternal forebears but concern about Islam is rooted in concrete recent experience. The 9/11 attacks were the most devastating terrorist acts in American history, and the culprits were indisputably Muslim, even if they weren’t models of the faith.