A Green Light for Anti-Islam Bigotry for Trump’s GOP
Congressional Republicans are openly attacking Muslim Americans.
Almost a decade removed from President Donald Trump’s attempt to ban Muslims from entering the country during his first term—a vile passion project that has been given new life in his second presidency—a growing number of House and Senate Republicans are taking Islamophobia to a new level, actively calling for discrimination against Muslims and even arguing that some should be denaturalized and deported from the United States.
Foremost among the proudly anti-Muslim politicians is Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.).
“I think mainstream Islam is not compatible,” Fine said in a November Newsmax interview when asked by host Todd Starnes if Muslims can coexist with the Constitution. “I think mainstream Islam is a threat to the United States.”
“The left is rooted in a belief that all cultures are equal, that we’re all good people, that we can sit and talk through our problems, that we all share the same values. And that is not true,” Fine said last week in another Newsmax appearance. “There is evil in this world. Mainstream Islam, as we saw on October 7th, as we’ve seen in Syria, as we’ve seen in Nigeria—it lionizes and it glorifies death. That’s what they celebrate.”
Fine has also posted his views on X:
In another post attacking a speech by his House colleague, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who is a practicing Muslim, Fine wrote: “This is the ugly face of Islam in America. Believe them when they say they are just getting started. It’s up to us to stop them.”
If this were all Fine had said about Islam in public, it would be a grotesque, alarming problem. But this is just a sampling of the man’s pronouncements about a two billion–person religious community. Fine posts about Islam a lot. Since November, he’s posted the word “Muslim” more than 50 times from his official account on X. That tally includes promotions of cable news interviews he’s done and random musings about this perceived threat of people who worship differently from him.
Fine isn’t the only one taking the anti-Muslim rhetoric to another level. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), who is now running for governor, posted that Islam is “a cult,” and that its adherents in the United States are “here to conquer” in order to establish a caliphate. Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas), a member of the House Freedom Caucus,1 reposted Tuberville’s statement.
It’s hard to imagine Tuberville offering a clearer or more direct condemnation of the world’s second-largest religion. It certainly goes beyond anything he’s said before. Comparing this post with his past statements gives you a sense of how acceptable it has become in the GOP to openly spout anti-Islamic bigotry.
Consider what Tuberville sounded like just two months ago. “If you want to peacefully practice your religion, that’s fine with me,” the Senator said in October. “That’s what our Constitution gives you the right to do. Our Constitution gives you that right, and that’s why we have millions—millions—of Christians, Jews, Mormons, Hindus, Buddhists, and peaceful Muslims who worship freely in this great country of ours called the United States of America.” (Emphasis mine.)
At the time of that speech, Tuberville was pushing a bill to ban Sharia law, a religious philosophy he, Fine, and others believe (or claim to believe) is a tool to usurp the Constitution and turn entire cities into Muslim caliphates.
It’s hardly the only bill of its kind under consideration. In the House, there are currently six bills that disapprovingly mention or attempt to ban Sharia law in some way, one of them being a companion to Tuberville’s “Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act.” (Several are resolutions concerning Nigeria, a country Trump offhandedly threatened for allegedly being a hotbed of anti-Christian persecution earlier this year.)
Those efforts reflected the longtime GOP priority of combating Islamic extremism. But that objective is quickly morphing into fuller blown anti-Islam hysteria. It’s coming from up high, with President Donald Trump unleashing a wave of bigotry against Somali Americans in Minnesota and Vice President JD Vance echoing it with racist remarks about the same community at the recent Turning Point USA rally.
But it’s also finding its way into formal congressional business. Fine is considering drafting a resolution to expel Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from Congress in the new year. “I don’t think she should be a citizen, let alone a member of Congress,” Fine told Axios.
If he goes ahead with it, Fine’s effort will fail in the House. But even though he can’t succeed in expelling Omar, his attempt to do so would still represent the internal permission structure the Republican party is building to allow its members to more openly discriminate against Muslims.
I spoke to Randa Fahmy,2 a Republican who served as associate deputy secretary of energy during the George W. Bush Administration and has worked in Muslim American community outreach, about how much worse the issue has gotten in recent years.
“That is a reflection, I think, of politics,” she said. “I’ve been in Washington thirty-eight years now, and it has degenerated into this very poor behavior of being able to say bad things publicly. You know, people used to say them anonymously [or] online. Now it’s kind of okay to say bad things publicly.”
“Certainly, everyone has felt like the gloves are off, and we can kind of say what we want to say and be as outrageous as we want to be, as long as it gets us two minutes of fame or a blurb on, you know, Fox News, right?” Fahmy added. “Or, in the case of Democrats, a crawl across the screen on CNN or MSNOW.”
When I asked her more specifically about Fine’s extreme comments, she suggested that it could come back to bite him given Florida’s substantial Muslim population.3
“Sometimes, you just have to follow the money and try to figure out where his funding might be coming from, and maybe that’s what’s motivating him, but it’s certainly not his constituency,” she said. “And if I were him, I’d be a little worried in the sixth district of Florida if he’s saying things like that. There’s a healthy Muslim-American community there who vote. They voted for President Bush in the year 2000. They rallied for President Trump again. So I just would be very careful if I were him saying what he said he wants to stay in Congress—maybe he doesn’t.”
Everywhere I go, I see his face
The Epstein files, the Trump administration’s resistance to releasing them, and the internal problems they’ve caused to the Republican party base have been some of the year’s defining political stories. And now they’re likely to remain so even after the calendar changes.
Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) are mulling punishments for Attorney General Pam Bondi over the Justice Department’s selective and haphazard release of the files, as well as its refusal to comply with the release timelines that were invested with the force of law as part of the bill they succeeded in passing in November.
A potential impeachment resolution for Bondi is unlikely, as Democrats are leery of pursuing something that the Senate will probably summarily toss the moment it arrives in the chamber. Contempt charges are possible as well, but they will need to be thoroughly and clearly articulated before enough aggrieved Republicans will be willing to sign on to get something passed over the objections of House leadership. And since any punishment for contempt of Congress would require the enforcement of the Justice Department itself, we have to imagine it won’t go far even if it were passed.
While Bondi’s approval rating has plummeted by almost 50 points since she took over the Justice Department earlier this year, public approval matters less to her future in the administration than Trump’s opinion of her does.
Regardless of what happens, I’ll have plenty of questions for our elected officials about it when Congress returns to session on January 5. If you want to stay in the loop, jump on a 30-day free trial for a Bulwark+ membership at the link below. If you’re already a subscriber, you’re doing great. Keep being awesome. I love you.
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It brings another layer of irony to the caucus’s name.
Correction (3 p.m. EST Dec. 23 2025): An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Randa Fahmy as a Muslim Republican. She is instead a Republican who has worked in Muslim American community outreach.
Tommy Tuberville calling out people as part of "a cult" is rich.
Islamophobia and antisemitism are two wings of the same bird of bigotry