I’ve covered Islamophobia for years. Trump’s GOP has taken it to a new level.

What do Republican officials think of the nation’s roughly 4.5 million Muslims? No need to ask—they’ll just tell you.

“Muslims don’t belong in American society,” says Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee. 

“No more Muslims immigrating to America,” says Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas. 

“We need more Islamophobia, not less,” says Rep. Randy Fine of Florida. 

“Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic,” says Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina. 

“No more Muslims,” says Rep. Chip Roy of Texas. 

“No more Islamic immigration,” says Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia. “Denaturalize, deport, repeat.”

“I hate Islam; it’s a demonic death cult,” says Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith of Indiana. 

“It is time to let your elected officials know exactly how you feel about the infiltration of Islam into our communities,” says Rep. Keith Self of Texas. 

“We must IMMEDIATELY BAN all ISLAM immigrants and DEPORT every single Islamist who is living among us just waiting to attack,” says Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

“Muslims need to be treated like enemy combatants,” says Laura Loomer, of Mar-a-Lago.

It’s a cliche, at this point, to suggest that if elected officials in this country talked about members of any other religious group the way they talk about Muslims they would be shunned from polite society—or at least called to account for it. But it’s hard to dispute the point. Open bigotry toward Muslims is not just a way to get ahead in Donald Trump’s Republican party. Increasingly, it seems to be the purpose of Trump’s Republican Party. It’s the key to understanding what’s changed in the MAGA world—and what has always been like this. The targeting and vilification of an American religious group is one of the most important stories of the midterms. We’re not talking about it enough.

I’ve been covering Islamophobia in politics at Mother Jones since Barack Obama’s first term, reporting on the rise of copycat anti-Shariah legislation in state legislatures in 2011 and a backlash to the construction of new Islamic centers. The most famous of these controversies was over the Park51 project in Lower Manhattan, which in the parlance of right-wing media became the “Ground Zero Mosque.” This boomlet was organized and well-funded, it had proponents in Congress and at think tanks and most definitely in the media, but it was also fundamentally grassroots. It was the thing people in power aren’t talking about enough. (In fact, some of these activists believed mainline Republican institutions like the American Conservative Union, which runs CPAC, had been captured by Islamists too.) This kind of Islamophobia was endemic to the Obama era—fusing conservative War on Terror tropes to conservative Black President tropes to conservative immigration tropes. Of the three, the first one evolved with the times; the second one faded; and the last one eventually dominated everything.

For a brief period, this kind of Islamophobia receded in salience a bit on the right. In 2013, I even wrote a piece about how the biggest Islamophobes had been banned from CPAC (accusing CPAC of being secretly Islamist did not go over well) and the anti-Shariah movement seemed to have burned out in the Capitol. Did the piece age well? No, it did not. But re-reading it is instructive, because a whole bunch of people who wielded influence within the party at the time—and who I credited with pushing back—were either out of the picture within a matter of years, or they adapted. Grover Norquist, John McCain, and John Boehner were all flawed in different ways but this stuff wasn’t their passion. Mike Rogers, then a Republican congressman from Michigan, played a part in turning down the temperature. It was possible, at times, to still separate the leaders from the fringe, in part because in 2013, there wasn’t any one leader to speak of.

That changed with Trump, who ran against the party’s old guard and then consolidated power while embracing Islamophobia like no one of his stature had before. His call for a temporary ban on all Muslims entering the country is still one of the most severe acts of religious discrimination ever proposed by an American president. But it’s worth keeping in mind that the sweeping ban stemmed from a specific panic over Syrian refugees, amid fears of attacks by ISIS. It was not pitched to the public as ethnic cleansing on a path to ethnonationalist renewal. Or at least not so directly. (To give you a sense of how Trump’s message was evolving even then, as recently as that September, the candidate was advocating for admitting Syrian refugees.) Trump’s proposal was properly characterized as extreme, and became the source of a lot of friction within the party—Sen. Mike Lee of Utah even compared the proposal to Missouri’s 1838 extermination order against Mormons. After Trump took office, the Muslim ban became the “Travel Ban,” and—in what would also become a trend—the Supreme Court agreed to pretend that although it looked like a Muslim Ban and sounded like a Muslim Ban and was designed by the very same people who promised to enact a Muslim Ban, this was actually something quite different. 

Trump was bigoted back then in ways you may have forgotten. I had to look up to confirm that when Khizr Khan, the father of an Army captain from Virginia who was killed in Iraq, spoke at the 2016 DNC, Trump had suggested his wife, Ghazala, had stayed silent on stage because of her oppressive Muslim faith. He told Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, along with several other members of Congress, to “go back” to their countries. Republicans just say this stuff about Muslims, and then no one ever talks about it again. Susan Collins probably still hasn’t seen it.

What’s happening now is of another magnitude. The anti-Shariah panic is back, but the level at which it’s playing out is different. Nearly a third of the House Republican conference is in something called the “Sharia-Free America Caucus.” It is not just the weirdos in the back of the room at tea party meetings, the ones with loud shirts and free time who are also shouting about fluoride. It is governors from some of the biggest and most diverse states in the union. (The fluoride people are also here, running the government now.) Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who was wishing his constituents a happy Ramadan quite recently, warned voters that his primary opponent, attorney general Ken Paxton, was allowing developers of master-planned communities to create a “safe haven for Shariah law.” Six days after 9/11, George W. Bush went to a mosque with a co-founder of the Council on American–Islamic Relations. Now Texas and Florida have designated CAIR a terrorist organization. The nominee for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission says every Muslim in the United States should be removed from the country, regardless of citizenship status. Paxton spoke at his rally. Remember Mike Rogers? He’s invoking the specter of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden in his campaign against Abdul El-Sayed, while the National Republican Senatorial Committee refers to the Democrat as “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.”

“I go by Timothy Eugene,” said South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, when called to task on CNN. “I get called that all the time.”

Okay, and it’s people like Timothy Eugene Scott, peddling rank bigotry with a smirk as if it’s all in a day’s work. Some of this is the result of Republican Party’s brain drain over the course of the Trump era, as rank-and-file normies were gradually replaced by a group of fake-it-til-you-make-it sycophants. Even an entry-level nativist ought to understand that swapping the Steak ‘n Shake in a Capitol Hill cafeteria with a halal fast-food shop famous for its “zinger burger” is not “equivalent to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in the 7th century,” but Georgia Rep. Mike Collins is—and I hope this is not the way he finds out—not a very smart person. Gill is a nepo-baby who got his job because his father-in-law is Dinesh D’Souza. Ogles was basically the Music Man of the Mid-South. Tuberville once lost to Vanderbilt. But it is also preeminent now in part because as Muslims become more visible at higher levels in American politics, the locus of the debate on the right has shifted from whether the wrong people might come over without vetting to whether the national fabric is dirtied by their very presence.

“Islam is largely alien to American history, it certainly didn’t come to the United States on the Mayflower,” Gill said at a press conference in February. Muslims are not, in other words, Heritage Americans.

Fact-checking people like Brandon Gill sort of misses the point of people like Brandon Gill. Still it is instructive, and easy enough to do. The Mayflower arrived on these shores nearly a century after the first known Muslim did. His story was memorialized in an extraordinarily famous travelogue; the congressman would not have heard of it. Like countless others of his faith who were brought on ships over the next several hundred years, the Muslim man in question—Estebanico—was an enslaved African. Republicans want to roll back the Civil Rights movement, the New Deal, the Progressive Era, and Reconstruction, until they are firmly ensconced in a world that resembles the old paintings they share amongst themselves. But even then, there were Muslims in the United States—just out of the frame, building the damn thing.

You could see the evolution in right-wing Islamophobia in how Charlie Kirk talked. At the beginning in the Trump years, Kirk would frequently identify the villain as “radical Islam”—a rhetorical holdover from this earlier War on Terror politics. But by 2025, as Zohran Mamdani rose to power in New York City, Kirk had dropped both the “radical” and the pretense: “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.” The American dream, he said, was owning a home, raising kids, and “not having them hear the Muslim call to prayer 5 times a day.” He invoked the Park51 project and 9/11. “Forget a mosque,” he said in June, 2025. “You’re gonna get a mayor! You’re not just gonna get like a singular place of religious gathering. There will be a potential Muslim mayor of New York City. The largest city in America and one of the most important cities on the planet. Civilization’s on the line.” The city, by virtue of voting for a Muslim, was the “battlefield for the future of the West.” You “become what you import.” Kirk spent much of the final year of his life beating this drum: “The conservative movement needs to focus more time, energy, and focus on how Islam is rapidly taking over the west.” Trump was the “bodyguard of Western Civilization,” he said, a bulwark against “Muhammad Mao”—meaning Mamdani—and the “Muslim invasion.”

This was the conservative movement’s leading activist. And it’s just sort of the default Republican position on Mamdani. Tuberville, who is likely going to be the next governor of Alabama, warned that after New York elected a Muslim mayor, “The enemy is inside the gates” and “We’ve got to SEND THEM HOME NOW or we’ll become the United Caliphate of America.” Jack Posobiec said at the National Conservativism Conference that, “we are less than 10 years away from one of America’s great cities being run by a Muhammad.” Rep. Elise Stefanik, the nationally recognized crusader against religious discrimination on college campuses, repeatedly called Mamdani a “jihadist.”

People who talk like this do not get ostracized. (Ogles and Mace are leaving Congress, but not because of anything they said about Muslims.) Gill was a featured speaker at Trump’s midterm convention. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, when asked in March about his colleagues’ assertion that Islam is the enemy, said that “there’s a lot of energy in the country and a lot of popular sentiment that the demand to impose Shariah law in America is a serious problem—that’s what animates this.” (“It’s apparently part of their religion,” Johnson said of Iran’s leaders earlier this months, “that they can just lie to someone they disagree with.”)

It is reductive and frankly a disservice to audiences to call this stuff “red meat” for “the base.” But more importantly, this bigotry has been a driving force in Trump’s second term, as he wields power he shouldn’t have to deliver pain to people that his acolytes do not think belong here even if they were born here. It is at the heart of an ideological project that has a far tighter grip on Washington than it had before, aimed at purging the country of the sort of people they think the country isn’t for, and moving heaven and earth to do it. They are saying many of the things they said before but louder, and with guns. The targets of their bile are schools and homes and places of worship; butcher shops and doctors and sporting events. It’s a government weaponizing the national-security state against grad students, launching a violent occupation of an American city because there are too many Somali-Americans, and imposing economic warfare against the state where many of them live.

The Muslim Ban was first proposed in late 2015 as a placeholder, Trump said, “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” It’s 2026 now. This is what happens when they finally figure it out.