LISTEN: Shadi Hamid discusses "Trumpism without Trump"
Shadi Hamid guested on the Political Theater podcast, via Roll Call. Listen here:
❝ Political scientist Shadi Hamid remembers growing up in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the son of Egyptian immigrants. In what was then a solidly Republican enclave of the Philadelphia suburbs, his parents and many of his Muslim neighbors voted for George W. Bush.
That seems like a long time ago, as that critical swing area of Philly has swung increasingly Democratic, along with most of America’s Muslims. So why would President Donald Trump spend so much time attacking Muslims and, in particular, a high-profile group of Democratic congresswomen, a.k.a. “the squad,” that has two Muslim members, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan? Well, because attacking your opponents across racial lines and defining them as a sinister other is a basic tenet of Trumpism, and the president and many of his Republican allies are all in.
“I think our initial instinct sometimes is to look at that and say, ‘Well, why would he do that? This seems crazy. … But the more I thought about it, there seemed to be a logic to it. And this is where I think Trump, to his discredit — but also, in a political sense, to his credit because he knows something about politics — has a sense of this darker side of the human psyche, and he knows how to tap into that at key moments,” Hamid says in the latest Political Theater podcast. … [RollCall.com]
| SHADI HAMID is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of several books, including Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World. Watch him discuss his book Islamic Exceptionalism below, and learn more about booking Shadi for your next event today. |
