Coming up with nondefamatory ways to attack Zohran Mamdani is not exactly an insurmountable task. The 33-year-old Democratic nominee for New York City mayor is an avowed socialist from a privileged background, has defended inflammatory rhetoric such as “Globalize the intifada,” and has a back catalog of hyper-woke social-media posts that would be electoral poison in any remotely competitive district.
Instead, many leading voices within the Republican Party have decided to criticize him on the grounds that, like 4.5 million other Americans, Mamdani is Muslim.
After Mamdani’s victory over Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary earlier this week, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene shared an image on X of a burka-clad Statue of Liberty. Influential activists including Charlie Kirk and Laura Loomer invoked 9/11, unsubtly implying that all Muslims, even secular ones like Mamdani, are jihadists. The New York Young Republican Club urged the Trump administration to deport him—Mamdani, who was born in Uganda, is a U.S. citizen—as did Representative Andy Ogles, who called Mamdani “little muhammad.”
None of this comes as a shock when the party is led by a president who has, among many other offenses, called immigrants “animals,” claimed that “they’re poisoning the blood of our country,” and told a radio host that they commit murder because “it’s in their genes.” In one sense, the outburst of nakedly xenophobic and anti-Muslim rhetoric from today’s Republican Party is simply a dog-bites-man story (or maybe, in Donald Trump’s case, a man-claims-people-eat-dogs story).
In another sense, however, there is something odd about the response to Mamdani’s victory. Trump won a second term in part because he drew larger numbers of minority voters, including Muslim Americans and immigrants, than any other Republican in decades. This shift was especially notable in big cities like New York. And yet, rather than cement this new coalition, the MAGA movement seems almost desperate to break it apart.
In 2016, 88 percent of Trump’s voters were white, according to a Pew Research Center survey of validated voters. In 2024, just 78 percent were. His expanded support among minorities seems to have been a reaction to inflation and unpopular progressive stances on immigration and other social issues taken by the Biden administration. Some Arab and Muslim voters also recoiled at the administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
Of course, elected presidents don’t always govern in a way that perfectly matches their campaign messages or winning coalitions. Joe Biden won largely thanks to voters’ displeasure with Trump’s chaotic governing style and mismanagement of the pandemic, and then pursued transformative climate-change legislation. George W. Bush famously ran for reelection on opposing gay marriage and mocking John F. Kerry’s manhood, and then tried to privatize Social Security.
But Trump’s second-term agenda is not merely unrelated to the source of his campaign success. In some ways it is diametrically opposed to it.
Trump was bound to impose less restraint on Israel than Biden did, but Trump has exceeded his predecessor by proposing mass population transfer from Gaza and by bombing Iran. Rather than cater to support among Latinos for stricter border control, Trump has seemed determined to alienate those voters by encouraging the indiscriminate detainment of Latinos, inevitably sweeping up legal residents and even citizens. Treating brown-skinned Americans like criminals has had the predictable effect of driving up support for comprehensive immigration reform and driving down Trump’s approval among Latinos.
Rather than pursue policies to bring down costs, as he promised to do during the campaign (at least when he was reading from scripted remarks prepared by advisers familiar with what voters wanted), Trump has largely ignored this imperative in office. Instead, his major economic initiatives—raising tariffs, deporting day laborers and other low-wage employees en masse, and blowing up the deficit with tax cuts—have put upward pressure on inflation. Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell has explained that some of these policies will delay interest-rate cuts, to which Trump’s response has been to berate him rather than adjust to economic reality.
Trump has governed as if he was cryogenically frozen when he left office and awakened in January. He has prioritized taking revenge on enemies from his first term, and learned almost nothing from the four years in between.
He seems to continue to subscribe to the “Great Replacement” theory, which posits that Democrats have deliberately encouraged mass illegal immigration in order to transform the electorate. Trump recently claimed on social media that Democrats “use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens.” Stephen Miller, his unofficial secretary of everything, concluded that Mamdani’s election shows “how unchecked migration fundamentally remade the NYC electorate.”
Just a few months ago, Trumpists were bragging about the multiracial working-class coalition that got them a second term. Now it’s as if they’ve forgotten that coalition entirely. Or perhaps, at some level, they don’t want to keep it intact, because they refuse to recognize those communities as fully American, or even fully human. Replicating the formula that won the 2024 election would mean turning Mamdani into a symbol of out-of-touch urban progressivism. Republicans seem unable to resist attacking him for his religion instead.
The post What the Islamophobic Attacks on Mamdani Reveal appeared first on The Atlantic.
