Connecting the Dots in Coverage of Trump and Islamophobia

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In 1981—in the wake of the Iran hostage crisis, an attack on the United States embassy in Tehran, which Time magazine described as a disaster of “mutual incomprehension”—Edward Said published Covering Islam, an examination of how Western media represents, and mishandles, Muslim life and imagery. “News,” he wrote, “is less an inert given than the result of a complex process of usually deliberate selection and expression.” Decades later, as Donald Trump returned to White House, and began to “flood the zone,” Muslim Americans could feel the significance of Said’s observation in the course of daily news consumption—through the selection of stories and framing, and their impact.

Over the course of his time in politics—and well before that, as a real estate developer—Trump has shown a knack for directing the attention of the press, in part by giving a name to something that imbues it with a sense of novelty, or shock. Lately, he has done so by unleashing a spate of executive orders targeting immigrants, including one “against invasion” and another “protecting the United States from foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats.” The press has responded to the deluge of announcements in kind, raising alarm that grants credence to Trump’s premise, as in the Washington Post’s “Inside Trump’s immigration crackdown,” CNN’s “7 big questions about Trump’s immigration crackdown,” and ABC’s “Trump’s immigration crackdown ripples across the US.” These stories have proliferated even though the Trump administration has been, on average, deporting people at a slower rate than Joe Biden did during the last year of his presidency. To cover the news this way allows Trump ownership of the story, rather than connecting the latest developments to precedent.

The best example of Trump’s ability to infuse familiar policy with news interest may have come during his first term, with the so-called Muslim ban circa January 2017. Rowaida Abdelaziz, an investigative journalist who covers Muslim communities, reported extensively on the impact of the policy—which she viewed not as a breaking story, but as part of a long history of the government trying to stop people from entering the United States from Muslim-majority countries. Those efforts crescendoed after 9/11, with a series of laws and programs—concerning everything from excessive travel screenings to surveillance—that discriminated against Muslims in the name of national security. Members of both parties were involved: George W. Bush deported thousands of Muslim men, without evidence of terrorist activities; the program continued under most of Barack Obama’s term. “It shape-shifts, presenting itself in the form of surveillance or travel bans,” Abdelaziz said, of anti-Muslim policy. “When having these conversations, it’s so important to remember the historical context when we’re discussing present-day impact.”

At the start of this year, when Trump returned to office, Muslim-ban coverage resurged: “This version is quieter, sneakier, and more dangerous than the one we all remember,” per The Nation. According to Vox, “Trump’s first travel ban was overturned in court in 2017. His legal strategy may be savvier this time around.” Reuters reported, “US civil rights groups are warning that an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on Monday lays the groundwork for reinstatement of a ban on travelers from predominantly Muslim or Arab countries.” Embedded in these stories has been a sense of Trump as a singular figure—an especially vitriolic one, now with extra legal know-how—not an extension of anything that predates him.

To Eman Abdelahdi, a scholar at the University of Chicago who studies Muslim communities in the United States, the result is coverage lacking in texture, which fuels misunderstanding of the Muslim American experience. “There is a liberal voter who’s only really roused by inappropriate speech, but not really roused by the same policies if they come from a Democrat,” she said. The Biden administration extended policies targeting migrants from Muslim-majority countries, she noted, but the response from the press was comparatively muted when viewed next to what has been published since Trump’s inauguration. During the same period, anti-Muslim hate crimes skyrocketed. 

Rokhaya Diallo—a writer and filmmaker who is a prominent voice on race in France—believes that Trump’s policies must be situated within a broader intellectual framework that aims to justify Islamophobia. “This ‘Great Replacement’ theory—the idea that immigrants would take over and ‘invade’ the United States—actually originates from European supremacist intellectual circles,” she said. She noted Trump’s expression of admiration for Emmanuel Macron’s migration policies during a state visit in 2018, and Steve Bannon’s ties to far-right parties in Europe. “Trump is also the product of an international context where ideas are born and circulate on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Connecting the dots is key. “A good story isn’t just the cause and effect, but it’s following who in the White House has ties with anti-Muslim groups, which world leaders are whispering in the president’s ear, and tracking how federal agencies are disproportionately targeting Muslim movements,” Abdelaziz said. “These are just some examples of how I have covered—and how more journalists need to report more critically when it comes to Muslim animus under a Trump administration.”

This article was produced with support from the Round Earth Media program of the International Women’s Media Foundation.

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Aida Alami is a Moroccan reporter usually based in Rabat, Morocco, and Paris. She is currently the James Madison Visiting Professor on First Amendment Issues at the Columbia School of Journalism.