@middleeasteye: Soumaya Ghannoushi, a British Tunisian writer and expert in Middle East politics, says Donald Trump’s attack on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, calling her and her supporters “garbage,” marks a new descent into political depravity in the United States. She writes that Omar embodies everything Trump fears: “the hijab, Africa, migration, Muslimness, womanhood, autonomy,” turning a routine political attack into a broader assault on millions of Americans. Ghannoushi argues that Trump’s rhetoric is not impulsive but ideological, part of a system that degrades Muslims, migrants, Black and brown communities, and treats Islamophobia as a racial weapon. She notes that this environment has produced candidates who boast about wanting to “kick out dirty Muslims,” reflecting what she calls the full bloom of the Trumpian ecosystem: loud, illiterate, shameless. She says that Trump is not inventing new hatreds but laundering old ones, replicating the historical language used to strip Black Americans and other minorities of their humanity. His contempt for Muslims, she says, evaporates only when confronted with “oil, arms and obscene wealth.” Ghannoushi concludes that the America Trump seeks to erase is already here, multiracial, multi-faith, irreversible. The real conflict is between two Americas: one clinging to a mythologised white past, and another that is plural, visible and unstoppable. What hangs in the balance, she says, is whether the United States will continue to bow to Trump’s resentments or finally accept the country it has already become

Middle East Eye

Open In TikTok:

Region: GB

Saturday 06 December 2025 18:00:00 GMT