The morning after a bombshell report suggested President Trump directed his former attorney to break the law, he took to Twitter to stoke fears about Muslims crossing the border.
Trump on Friday tweeted about a Washington Examiner article from days earlier, which quotes a rancher near the U.S.-Mexico border as saying, "We've found prayer rugs out here. It's unreal." Trump wrote in his tweet, "People coming across the Southern Border from many countries, some of which would be a big surprise."
The article itself quotes a single, anonymous rancher, who provides no evidence for her claim. Reports like these have spread online for years without any proof, with Politifact giving one of them a Pants on Fire rating in 2014. Trump's tweet garnered backlash from critics who doubted the report.
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But trying to prove the statement true or false is to miss the point, Adam Serwer explains for The Atlantic:
Even if the claim were true, it would prove nothing. It can provoke alarm only on the basis of the bigoted assumption that every Muslim is a terrorist, and therefore the presence of a prayer rug somewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border means that terrorists have sneaked into the United States. You can buy prayer rugs to decorate your home with on Etsy; you can also use them in devotions. It is an absurd and prejudiced assumption that they are an indication of terrorism, rooted in nothing more than animus toward Muslims. It is bad enough that some Americans provide an eager audience for this kind of nonsense. It is catastrophic that one of them is president.
Read more at The Atlantic.
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