Republicans in Congress have said that “Muslims don’t belong in American society” and that “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”
On the campaign trail, GOP candidates have called for an end to “Islamic immigration” and declared the religion incompatible with Western civilization.
And top Republicans from the Hill to the White House have shown little appetite to repudiate their language, drawing a stark contrast with past party leaders. Asked this week whether he had gotten pushback from GOP colleagues for saying “Islamists are the enemy,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) smiled.
“Nobody’s saying anything,” he said.
Republican politicians are ramping up attacks on Muslims and facing few political consequences, and sometimes seeing political benefit, unnerving civil rights advocates and signaling a new normal of open Islamophobia heading into campaign season. Rather than rebuke broad criticism of Muslims in the wake of terrorism — as President George W. Bush once did after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 — GOP leaders have allowed the most blatant anti-Muslim comments to go largely unchallenged.
“Demagoguery and scapegoating of minorities has always been a powerful force in politics,” said Gregg Nunziata, a Republican attorney and former adviser to then-Sen. Marco Rubio who now leads a nonprofit focused on the rule of law. “What’s new is that people in leadership roles don’t see it as their job to tamp it down.”
The rhetoric about Muslims ratcheted up in recent weeks as attacks around the country led some Republicans to call for sweeping new immigration restrictions. One incident involved a gunman wearing a sweatshirt with the message “Property of Allah.” In another, officials said a man opened fire after shouting, “Allahu akbar.” Some attacks were linked to the Islamic State.
But some in the Republican Party had already been focusing intensely on Islam amid a broader push on the right to curb legal immigration, not just illegal entries at the southern border.
In Texas, for instance, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) declared a Muslim civil rights group a terrorist organization late last year, while Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) has sued to stop the group from operating in the state. Texas Republicans put a proposition that says the state should ban sharia law, or Islamic law, on their March 3 primary ballot; it passed overwhelmingly as candidates up and down the ballot campaigned on vows to fight “radical Islam” — or sometimes just Islam.
The onslaught has dismayed Muslim Americans, who increasingly embraced Republicans in the lead-up to the 2024 election and helped elect Trump amid anger over Democrats’ handling of the Israel-Gaza war. Before the election, Pew Research found that Democrats’ advantage with Muslim Americans had shrunk and that about 42 percent of Muslim adults identified with or leaned toward the Republican Party.
Nafees Asghar, a 55-year-old Muslim in Texas, has long felt the GOP aligned more with his conservative values and said he helped persuade his Muslim friend to run for local office as a Republican rather than a Democrat in 2024. His wife ran unsuccessfully for the statehouse as a Republican too, campaigning against teaching about transgender identity in schools and the “progressive agenda.”
But Asghar increasingly views the Republican Party as “anti-Muslim” and isn’t sure how he’ll vote in the fall. He declined to vote for Abbott in the primary this year and isn’t happy with Paxton, the attorney general and U.S. Senate candidate, who recently responded “Agree” to a Republican lawmaker’s call on social media for “No more Islamic immigration.”
“We are raising our kids to be proud Muslim Americans,” said Asghar, who immigrated to the United States in 1992. “They love this country; this is the only country they have, and I don’t understand.”
President Donald Trump shocked his fellow Republicans a decade ago when he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” during his first presidential campaign. The House speaker at the time, Republican Paul D. Ryan, defended the “vast majority” of Muslims as peaceful and said it was “incumbent upon leaders” to make clear what conservatism really meant.
Now Trump presides over a party remade in his image — one in which Rep. Andrew Ogles (R-Tennessee) drew muted backlash last week for saying Muslims do not belong in the United States. Ogles’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
“It’s sad to see how normalized this obscene level of racism has become, and I think that stems from the top,” said Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Arizona), who is Iranian American and has been outspoken about the issue.
Asked about Ogles’s comments last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) said he discussed “tone” with members but did not criticize them.
“There’s a lot of… popular sentiment that the demand to impose sharia law in America is a serious problem — that’s what animates this,” Johnson said. Muslims may follow sharia in their private life, advocates say, but it’s not clear how they could enforce those rules above U.S. law.
In separate comments this week, Johnson said that “we love Muslim people” and drew a contrast with “Islamists” who promote Islamic law, suggesting the latter group is what Republican lawmakers are concerned about.
The White House did not respond to questions about lawmakers’ anti-Muslim comments and whether Trump thinks Muslims belong in the United States. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) did not publicly address the issue until a Washington Post reporter asked him Tuesday if he disagreed with colleagues’ recent comments.
“I’m not sure who made those comments, but I don’t like them,” Thune said of the idea that Muslims are the “enemy” or don’t belong.
Many GOP lawmakers made clear in interviews that they didn’t agree, either. Sen. Jim Justice (West Virginia) said that “we should be welcoming all.” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming) said the U.S. was founded on freedom of religion. Sen. John Neely Kennedy (Louisiana) said it’s “very important to separate Muslims from the fraction … of Muslims that have bastardized their religion.”
But others avoided taking a position. Sen. Eric Schmitt (Missouri) bristled when asked whether he disagreed with Ogles’s assertion that Muslims don’t belong in the U.S.: “I’m not going to comment on your ridiculous question.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) — who has become a leading voice against antisemitism in both parties — sidestepped when asked if Republican leaders should speak up against anti-Muslim comments like Ogles’s.
“I think we need to be vigilant stopping radical Islamic terrorism,” Cruz responded.
The politicians making the starkest anti-Muslim comments have taken pride in the controversy. Tuberville, the senator from Alabama, has pinned his post about “the enemy” to the top of his X account, juxtaposing pictures of the 9/11 terrorist attacks with a picture of Zohran Mamdani, the Muslim mayor of New York, sitting at an iftar dinner in New York City Hall.
In a brief interview, Tuberville said he has Muslim friends and does not view all Muslims as the enemy. But he made no attempt at nuance when shared a news article headlined, “Tuberville shares social media post suggesting Muslims are ‘the enemy.’”
“To be clear, I didn’t ‘suggest’ Islamists are the enemy. I said it plainly,” Tuberville wrote.
Rep. Randy Fine (R-Florida) faced some Democratic calls for censure last month after responding to an activist’s criticism of dogs as indoor pets by saying, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”
An email soon went out seeking donations for Fine to “stop the Islamic takeover,” demonstrating the potential political benefits of anti-Muslim comments that draw national attention.
“When I proudly chose dogs over Mainstream Muslims, causing the Left to panic as if Joe Biden just declared another presidential run, I DID NOT STUTTER,” the email read.
Fine defended his comments in an interview, saying that he does not believe all Muslims are bad people but that “we should be afraid of a faith that has inspired this much violence.”
“We need more Islamophobia, not less,” he wrote on social media last week.
Doug Heye, a former aide to GOP House leadership, drew a contrast with the party’s swift rebukes of former congressman Steve King’s offensive comments in 2019. Republican leaders denounced King and stripped him of committee assignments after he wondered aloud: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”
“Language like this was something that the party used to do something about,” Heye said of lawmakers’ comments about Muslims. Now, he said, “nasty rhetoric gets rewarded.”
More than 4 million Muslims live in the U.S., but they are a small minority, making up about 1 percent of the population. Corey Saylor, the research and advocacy director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations — the group some GOP officials have declared a terrorist organization, over its denials — lamented that there is rarely a political cost to Islamophobia.
“It works, politically,” Saylor said.
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