Trump’s Toxic Islamphobia Made This American Muslim Quit After 8 Days (VIDEO)

It’s no secret that Islamophobia runs deep in the DNA of the Donald Trump White House. But one person saw it first-hand–and is speaking out about it. A National Security Council staffer who was a holdover from the Obama administration thought she could open the eyes of her new bosses. However, Trump’s Muslim ban made it apparent to her that this was not possible, and she resigned only eight days into the new administration.

Rumana Ahmed spent most of her life living the American dream. Her parents came to this country from Bangladesh in 1978, 11 years before she was born. Her mother runs a day care, while her father rose to an assistant vice president at Bank of America before his death in a 1995 car accident. She began wearing a hijab in 2001–not long before the September 11 attacks. She told The Atlantic that in the face of the bullying, she remembered a Bengali proverb–“When a man kicks you down, get back up, extend your hand, and call him brother.”

That resilience saw her through when she attended George Washington University. Interning at the Obama White House overcame her skepticism of politics, and she began working at the White House soon after her graduation in 2011. By 2012, she moved to the Office of Public Engagement, in the West Wing. She worked with a number of communities, including her fellow American Muslims, on a number of issues.

In 2014, Ahmed moved to the NSC as a senior adviser, where she continued her work to engage with the Muslim community and also worked on issues such as global entrepreneurship. For most of her tenure, she was the only hijabi-wearing woman in the West Wing. She remembered how Franklin Graham whined about how the government had been “infiltrated by Muslims.” It made her think:

“Damn right I’m here, exactly where I belong, a proud American dedicated to protecting and serving my country.”

Watch this profile of her work from Voice of America in October 2016.

That profile was an obvious thumb of the nose to the Islamophobia that had ramped up considerably from 2015 onward, and had reached a fever pitch by the home stretch of the campaign. She heard some of the worst of the conspiracy theories about radical Muslims being embedded in the government.

Nothing prepared her, though, for the prospect that some of the people who peddled this bilge would be her bosses. Trump’s surprise win made her seriously consider leaving. She’d watched with alarm as his calls for a ban on Muslim immigration caused a spike in hate crimes against Muslims. Additionally, incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was a chest-beating Islamophobe. Despite all of this, Ahmed decided to stay on, believing that a “colored, female, hijab-wearing, American Muslim patriot” could help open Trump’s eyes.

Ahmed knew she would have her work cut out for her when she reported for work on January 23 and recalled the “cold surprise” with which she was greeted at what was now a “monochromatic and male bastion”–a marked contrast to how she was received in the Obama White House. It didn’t get much better over the next week.

“The entire presidential support structure of nonpartisan national security and legal experts within the White House complex and across federal agencies was being undermined. Decision-making authority was now centralized to a few in the West Wing. Frustration and mistrust developed as some staff felt out of the loop on issues within their purview. There was no structure or clear guidance.”

She described what she witnessed as “a chaotic attempt at authoritarianism.” She wasn’t the only one; a veteran staffer who dated back to the Reagan era described what he was seeing as “chaos.” But Ahmed thought she could still stick it out. That changed with the rollout of the travel ban. She argued that it merely gave legal sanction to “discrimination that has existed for years at airports,” and actually undermined the nation’s security.

To Ahmed’s mind, this ban was founded on a faulty premise that had long been pushed by the “alt-right writers” that were now in the White House–the idea that “Islam and the West are at war with each other.” Ironically, she says, this is a carbon copy of an argument that ISIS uses.

Ahmed realized that she could no longer work for an administration that saw her and other Muslims “not as fellow citizens, but as a threat.” When she told senior NSC communications adviser Michael Anton that she was leaving, she was unsparing.

“I told him I had to leave because it was an insult walking into this country’s most historic building every day under an administration that is working against and vilifying everything I stand for as an American and as a Muslim. I told him that the administration was attacking the basic tenets of democracy. I told him that I hoped that they and those in Congress were prepared to take responsibility for all the consequences that would attend their decisions.”

She later found out that Anton, using the alias “Publius Decius Mas,” wrote an essay deriding Islam as incompatible with Western values, and claimed multiculturalism as a whole promotes disunity and weakness. Putting national security in the hands of people like Anton, Ahmed says, is “dangerous.”

That’s being rather kind to it. What is also dangerous, and outrageous, is that true patriots like Ahmed are made to feel unwelcome in their own country.

(featured image courtesy Leah Varjacques, The Atlantic)

Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook. Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello.