Trump’s presidency legitimated overt anti-Muslim racism and drove a spike in hate crimes.

Evidence

The Trump presidency was the most Islamophobic in US history. During Trump’s time in office, anti-Muslim racism in its blatant and far right-wing form was legitimated, particularly among the tens of millions of his most ardent supporters. After the civil rights movement, Republicans had to resort to dog whistle tactics to appeal to racist voters, but Trump was able to overcome “political correctness” and to bring overt racism into the mainstream. His bigoted rhetoric and policies created a spike in hate crimes and bias incidents carried out by both state agencies and right-wing vigilantes. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) reported 10,015 anti-Muslim acts between 2014 and 2019, with a 94 percent jump in 2017 in the wake of the first iteration of the Muslim ban. Over that five-year period, CAIR documented 1,164 hate crimes, 506 attacks on mosques, and 2,783 acts of discrimination by state agencies including the FBI, the Transportation Security Administration, and the US Customs and Border Protection. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 635

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• SEED: The contrast between post-civil-rights dog-whistle politics and Trump’s overt racism is an angle: how the Overton window on state-sponsored racism shifted, and what closed it again.

Related

• Trump legitimated overt anti-Muslim racism that post-civil-rights Republicans only dog-whistled (similarity 0.97)
• Anti-Muslim racism intensified and became a deliberate GOP electoral strategy. (similarity 0.83)
• Trump’s Muslim ban escalated Islamophobia to overt racial-nationalist action (similarity 0.82)
• Trump’s election triggered a 300-percent spike in anti-Muslim hate group membership (similarity 0.81)
• Hate crimes, hate groups, and antisemitic incidents all surged sharply from 2016 to 2017. (similarity 0.81)
• Over 40 percent of Trump supporters rated Muslims as extremely violent in 2016. (similarity 0.80)
• Anti-Muslim hate incidents rose 57 percent in 2016 (similarity 0.80)
• Trump exploited rather than created anti-Muslim sentiment built by fifteen years of war (similarity 0.80)
• Trump’s election raised the harm risk for visibly Muslim Americans (similarity 0.80)
• Forty percent of post-election hate crimes explicitly invoked Trump’s name or slogans (similarity 0.79)
• Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric increased American hostility toward Muslims. (similarity 0.79)
• Trump’s overt racism differed in style from prior administrations but not substance. (similarity 0.78)
• Trumpism predates Trump and will outlast his presidency (similarity 0.78)