The Muslims who voted for Trump
Over one-third of American Muslim voters backed the man who wanted to ban Muslims from entering the country.
Like most of you, I treated Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign as a joke and a publicity stunt when he descended the golden elevator in 2015. It’s only when he first proposed his Muslim ban that I realized just how dangerous he really was. I remember calling him a fascist on my (now-deleted) Twitter account and saying everyone’s top priority should be stopping him from gaining power.
We know how that turned out. And after he was sworn into office, one of his very first acts was an Executive Order banning Syrian refugees and citizens of several majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States.
And yet…when the opportunity to vote him out of office finally arose, a surprising number of American Muslims actually chose to give him four more years in office:
A survey conducted by the Associated Press revealed that while the majority of Muslims interviewed voted for the president-elect, 35% said they voted for Trump. That percentage was higher than the results from an exit poll conducted by the Council on American Islamic Relations, or Cair, that counted 18% of Muslim votes going for Trump.
Though Muslims account for less than 1% of the total US electorate, in places like Michigan, these voters can potentially be key to winning a state in a tight election battle, as happened in 2016 and again in 2020.
Exit polls can be notoriously misleading due to a number of factors such as the time the poll was conducted and whether or not a voter is telling the truth about if and who they voted for. But Trump-voting Muslims who spoke to the Guardian revealed a wide variety of reasons for backing a president who had termed their own religious group “a massive problem”.
For some, it was because of Trump’s more socially conservative policies. Others backed him for not starting any major new military actions in the Middle East. And for Muslims who’ve achieved the American dream and joined the ranks of the upper-middle class, Republican tax and economic policies looked more attractive:
Razzaqi said he voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, but he wasn’t always a fan of the Republican party.
“Obama came and I liked him a lot. Very humble, very nice guy, but he just started handing out money,” Razzaqi said. “I’ve always been a Democrat but I realize that they’re spoiling their own people and destroying American values that require you to get up and go and work and make your earning.”
Razzaqi makes his living by renting out and managing his properties. When asked if he would be affected by Biden’s plan to tax those making over $400,000 annually, he said he would. Like many who voted for Trump, Razzaqi sees the president as a “shrewd businessman” and Democrats as too generous on welfare issues.
“He’s not a seasoned politician. He’s a borderline crook and knows how to mend the laws and play the IRS. Making money in America is not a problem. Increasing wealth is not a problem,” Razzaqi said. “Running a country is a business.”
Razzaqi acknowledged Trump’s Muslim ban but chalked it up to a lack of self-restraint.
“He’s got the biggest mouth. That’s the biggest problem,” Razzaqi said. “If he had the etiquette, he would be remembered as the best president ever.”
As Andrew Sullivan notes, Trump did surprisingly well among many minority groups, while Biden was propelled to victory in no small part because of right-leaning white people disgusted with Trump:
If there has been one, consistent elite narrative about this presidency, it is that it’s been the apotheosis of “white supremacy”: the most racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, anti-Black, transphobic, Islamophobic, and xenophobic manifestation of the American cis-hetero white patriarchy you could possibly come up with. And yet a critical segment of all these duly oppressed minorities voted for it to continue.
Yes, the exit polls need to be verified and may shift — but they’re the best data we now have. And across the surveys, Trump won 30 percent of non-white men, 32 — 35 percent of Latinos, 28 - 34 percent of Asians, 52 percent of Native Americans, 59 percent of Pacific Islanders, and 27 - 28 percent of gay men, lesbians and transgender people. 30 percent of Muslims voted for the president who initiated the “Muslim ban” in immigration — a big jump from last time. In 2016, only 15 percent of American Muslims said they were Republican; by 2020, 25 percent did. Or take the gays: the Republicans got the highest percentage of the gay vote this year since it was first recorded in 1992 while the Democrats slumped to an all-time low.
In its analysis of the result, the New York Times noted that “the only House seats Republicans picked up that were not in districts Mr. Trump also carried were in heavily Hispanic or Asian regions.” Outside the category of “minority” but well inside the woke category of “oppressed”, 60 percent of non-college white women voted for Trump, along with 21 percent of working class black women, even if it empowers the patriarchy.
Even as someone who can’t believe anyone voted for Trump, there’s a part of my that’s kind of impressed by this. If you think the United States is badly divided now, imagine what it would be like if almost everyone from each particular social group voted in lockstep for one political party. Who knows? Maybe the country isn’t quite as polarized on racial and religious lines as the hardcore ideologues on social media would have you believe.
Speaking of polarization and hardcore ideologues…
Via Cockburn in The Spectator, the most 2020 headline imaginable: “Wisconsin Students Wage War Against Racist Rock.” And the story is not about, say, Skrewdriver, but about an actual rock.
Because someone once used a racist term to describe it. In 1925.
Progressives may have defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 election, but it is apparent that Trump’s defeat has done nothing to banish the demons tormenting them. Proof of that comes from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where students are struggling to banish a rock for the sin of racism.
The offending hunk of igneous ore is the Chamberlin Rock, which rests atop the university’s Observatory Hill. The 70-ton boulder arrived in Wisconsin (‘gentrified’ it, if you will) sometime during the last Ice Age, where a (racist?) glacier deposited it on the site of today’s university. In 1925 it was dug up and placed on display as an artifact of the state’s geological history.
And with that, the rock’s fate was sealed. It did the worst thing you can possibly do in 2020: exist in the past. You see, it turns out that in the year the rock was dug up, a common slang term for big rocks incorporated an even more common racial epithet. And woefully, a contemporary newspaper at the time dared to use the word. School historians say this seems to be the only time the word was ever used in print, and even as a spoken word it died out during the Eisenhower administration. But such temporal trifles are irrelevant. Students at Wisconsin want the rock gone, as a ‘painful reminder of the history of racism on campus’.
And the school seems happy to oblige. Per the Wisconsin State Journal, U-Wisconsin’s public history project director says eliminating the rock will let the school ‘engage in complex conversations’, like how looking at a rock makes some people feel bad.
Meanwhile, the British Library has released a report on famous Britons’ connections to the slave trade, including Ted Hughes and George Orwell. Who had ancestors who owned slaves. Hundreds of years before they were born.
The celebrated poet Ted Hughes has been added to a dossier linking him to slavery and colonialism by the British Library.
The former Poet Laureate, who came from humble origins in Yorkshire, was found to be a descendant of Nicholas Ferrar who was involved in the slave trade some 300 years before Hughes was born.
Ferrar, born in 1592, and his family, were 'deeply involved' with the London Virginia Company, which sought to establish colonies in North America.
[…]
Romantic poet Lord Byron was added to this list because his great-grandfather was a merchant who owned an estate in Grenada.
His uncle through marriage also owned a plantation in St Kitts.
Oscar Wilde was included because of his uncle's interest in the slave trade, even though the research noted there was no evidence the acclaimed Irish writer inherited any of the money through the practice.
Meanwhile George Orwell, who was born Eric Blair in India, had a great-grandfather who was a wealthy slave owner in Jamaica.
But the Orwell Society said the money had long since disappeared before Orwell was even born.
From all indications, the British Library isn’t seeking to “cancel” these writers, but just wants to put their lives in context, which is why I give it five years before their books are withdrawn from libraries and pulped, or maybe buried under offending boulders.
This is the most Toronto Star thing that has ever happened in the history of the Toronto Star.
It makes sense that Trump could be seen as a shrewd businessman by voters. Of course, in my view, a president should not be playing the IRS. Or lie his way through life by being ‘shrewd’. But that’s just my viewpoint. ;p
Oh gawd, a racist rock. The funny thing is, it became racist by being called racist names (?) by someone else, which should be obvious since a rock cannot call itself anything. And yet, it is deemed offensive. If someone calls me racist, does that make it so?
I grew up with this odd idea that universities were supposed to *educate* people. To me, that means logical thinking and questioning my own thoughts and ideas, amongst other things. Having a university simply agree with everything would be disappointing to me if I were a student. The point is to be taught how to think, analyze, and in this case, relate fiction to fact.
But I guess the rock is not the only one being judged for its ancient history for which it is not at fault.
Sexualized sauce. Ahem. I can see how someone might drag a sexualized meaning out of the jerk sauce label if they try really, really...... *hard*, but am at a loss for the pho sauce. And did the complainant take those pictures herself?
The scariest part is not that someone would do this, but that it works. Large numbers of people are willing to follow anyone who points a finger, at just about anything, without ever sparing a moment to think for themselves.
It seems educational institutions that teach critical thinking are needed more than ever.