Timing has never been my strong suit. I moved to the United States from Britain only a few weeks before Donald Trump declared that he was running for president in the summer of 2015. Trump launched his primary campaign by smearing Mexican immigrants as “rapists”, and by the end of the year he was calling for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”.
As a Muslim immigrant in America, I won’t pretend that I wasn’t concerned – for my security, for my kids, for our future in this polarised country. Over the course of a bizarre, 18-month presidential election campaign, I watched and listened in horror as Trump declared that “Islam hates us”; falsely claimed that Muslim Americans celebrated on 9/11; attacked Barack Obama for visiting a mosque; and lambasted Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the ultra-dignified Muslim parents of a US soldier who was killed in Iraq in 2004. (The Khans had criticised Trump in a speech at the Democratic National Convention, after which the billionaire said of Khizr: “If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say.”) When asked by NBC how his proposal for a database of Muslims living in the US differed from the Nazi registry of German Jews in the 1930s, Trump responded: “You tell me.”
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