Obama’s surveillance state mainstreamed Islamophobia that enabled Trump’s victory

Evidence

From the symbolic perch of mutual understanding and tolerance, he ushered in a modern network of surveillance that flipped imams into informants and entrapped Muslim youth on the internet and in the heart of Muslim communities in the United States and abroad. … Eight years of Obama’s War on Terror dissonance laid the groundwork for an unfiltered era of American Islamophobia. The door was opened for the same unhinged anti-Muslim populism that took hold in Europe to make its way across the Atlantic and to an orange-skinned huckster keen on marketing anything, even Islamophobia, to claim the White House. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 301

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the reader’s parallel reading of Iftikhar on American Islamophobia’s institutional roots, and to the chapters presumably covering Bush and the security state. — connects to: Obama’s rebranded war on terror kept drone and special-forces targeting against Muslims — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 507; By late 2015 a majority of Trump supporters believed Obama was Muslim — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 49; Trump’s Islamophobia represented far-right racial nationalism, not merely Bush revival