U.S. President Donald Trump won the 2016 election with scare tactics and fear-mongering, pitting groups of people against one another because they have a different skin tone or religion. He scared people into voting for him and played on their racism and xenophobia.
It should come as no surprise, then, that he is back to these original tactics as the 2020 election begins to pick up speed. There are now 18 Democrats who have entered the race for the presidency, and while only a few will end up with the support of the public, the large pool of people who could potentially take down Trump must be making him nervous.
He has likely decided to start up his hateful tirade against Muslims again for this reason. It worked last time, and who is to say it will not work again? Fear motivates people, especially in politics, and when that is combined with racism and threats of terrorism, it makes for a disaster.
In this past week, Trump has chosen to target the new U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota. Omar, a Somali refugee, and her family obtained asylum in the United States when she was a teenager. She is also a woman I personally look up to.
Omar is the first woman to wear a hijab on the floor of the House, and she is a symbol to refugees and Muslims that they are being represented in ways America has not seen before.
Women of color in representative positions, such as Omar, matter because one of our future presidents might be a Muslim girl that she inspired to go into politics. Women and men like her make Congress look more like it was intended to be: a true representation of the American people.
Trump choosing her as the target for his hateful attacks infuriates me because her presence in Congress is amazing and shows the steps forward we are taking as a country. He is purposefully trying to ruin this progress by making her out to be un-American.
He recently tweeted a video with images and video from 9/11 that also included footage of Omar talking about Muslims in the United States and how they were targeted after the attacks. This video caused many people to threaten Omar and has caused concern for her safety.
First of all, nothing she said was untrue. American Muslims did receive threats and harassment and face Islamophobia after 9/11, regardless of the fact they had nothing to do with it. In fact, hate crimes against the Muslim community have only gone up since 9/11 occurred.
Terrorists committed the terrible acts of 9/11, not the true Muslim community. President Trump cannot seem to distinguish between the two, and he would rather combine a group that only practices peace with radical jihadists that twist the Quran for their own evils.
The fact he was willing to create this propaganda, even though it ended up creating concerns for Omar’s safety, goes to show he will do whatever and say whatever to scare the people of America into reelecting him.
Trump has claimed many times he saw Muslims cheering during 9/11 and though it has been pointed out to him on multiple occasions that there is no actual proof of this, he sticks to his statement. It pits Americans against the Muslim community and supports his twisted ideology that Muslims and terrorists are one and the same.
Trump even once said he would not be opposed to creating a registry for Muslims in the country. This scares me more than most things he has said because it sounds too similar to how Jewish people were treated during the Holocaust — another situation where fear tactics were used to divide a nation against a specific group of people and allowed for terrible things to happen.
The worst part is that Americans actually fall for this blatant racism, the lies and the tricks, to make them fearful of anyone who is different. If Americans continue to fall for this propaganda and stay rooted in the Islamophobic speech Trump is spouting, he will be reelected in 2020.
