American history is checkered with ugly bouts of religious persecution—from Protestant mobs burning convents in the 1830s, to Henry Ford publishing anti-Semitic propaganda in the 1920s, to anti-Muslim violence after September 11. But there was one thing that, until 2016, had never happened before in the history of our country. No one had ever won the presidency on a campaign that prominently and persistently attacked a religious minority.
As a candidate, Donald Trump didn’t just demonize Muslims rhetorically. He offered specific policies that ran against our shared consensus about religious freedom. He proposed banning Muslims from immigrating to the country, claiming that Muslim refugees were “trying to take over our children and convince them how wonderful ISIS is and how wonderful Islam is.” Just as stunning, Trump said he would “absolutely” require American Muslims to register in a special database to make it easier for the government to track them. Finally, he said that “there’s absolutely no choice” but to close down some American mosques as a way of combating extremism.
Anti-Muslim animus grew as the 2016 election approached and Republican voters learned to take their cues from Trump. The percentage of Republicans who believed that at least half of Muslims living in the United States were anti-American jumped from 47 percent in 2002 to 63 percent in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center. Most shockingly, according to a Public Policy Polling survey, only half of Republicans were willing to say that Islam should be legal in America. So when Trump, a week after his inauguration, signed an executive order banning foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States, he was doing so with the overwhelming support of the voters who put him in office.