Campaign Action
It took only a few days. And it is indicative of the sort of support Trump has garnered: Racists, conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and the rest of the far-right fringe were quick to declare Democratic convention speaker Khizr Khan and his wife are not truly patriotic Muslims—and much, much worse.
Roger Stone, a longtime Trump ally and adviser, is promoting smears against fallen U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan and his family. Stone is claiming that Khizr Khan, Capt. Kahn’s father, is a “Muslim Brotherhood agent” and is promoting an article suggesting Humayun Khan was a double agent working for Al-Qaeda. [...]
He tweeted on July 31 that Khan is “more than an aggrieved father of a Muslim son- he's Muslim Brotherhood agent helping Hillary” and Khizr Khan is "traced to the same radical Muslim group as @HumaAbedin.”
Republican operative Roger Stone can best be described as the illegitimate love child of Karl Rove and a dirty bin of used heroin needles, so it's not surprising that he personally was quick to promote the notion that the patriotic Muslim American family seen onstage were probably terrorist agents liked to Muslim Brotherhood and whose dead U.S. Army son was, according to the truly rancid conspiracy-riddled article he linked to, probably a double agent "working for the US and Al-Qaeda" who was "killed before his Islamist mission was accomplished."
Stone is an avid and prolific liar—who just happens to have been a "friend" of Donald Trump for, according to him, decades. The post he is referring to is by the venomous conspiracy theorist Walid Shoebat, and is par for the far-right course. (Indeed, the anti-Muslim far right has long supposed that a host of prominent Muslims or Muslim-linked Americans are "agents" of the terrorists, from Hillary Clinton's aide Huma Abedin to conservative anti-tax kingpin Grover Norquist. The claims are always vitriolic, and the proof is always ephemeral or simply fabricated.)
It is not possible, according to this theory, that there is such a thing as a patriotic Muslim American. They are all up to something; they are all working towards Sharia or are secretly in league with terrorists, and their dead Army sons were probably terrorists after all—even while they were serving their country, and dying for it. The similarity to pre-war Nazi rhetoric is too obvious to ignore. Under this theory, it is impossible for the ethnic other to love their nation. They are all colluding behind the scenes. They are seeking to destabilize us, they have secret connections to each other that they will use to bring us down, their mere presence is dangerous to us, and if we do not act to bar or banish them, they will destroy us.
But it wasn't just human urinal cake Roger Stone. The new claim spread like wildfire, both from advocates inside and outside Trump's campaign.
Fox Business News host Lou Dobbs responded eagerly with his own retweet of the their-Muslim-son-was-a-secret-terrorist claims: "Need to Check This Out; @realDonaldTrump #TrumpPence16 #MakeAmericaGreatAgain". (Yes, he really wrote that.) Writers at the Trump-fellating Breitbart were quick to promote the theory themselves, throwing in everything from email scandals to the Clinton Foundation to the suspicious squirrel outside the office windows.
The claim soon made it inside the Trump campaign itself, with Trump veterans' affairs adviser Al Baldasaro promoting the claims. "Read the truth about your hero, Mr Khan who used his son as Political Pawn", he tweeted.
This is where the Republican Party is at. This is the movement that Trump brought to the primary fore, and which the rest of the candidates dared not criticize or condemn lest they attract far-conservative ire. It is easier for Trump allies to believe that a U.S. Army captain who died in service to his country was a secret "double agent" than to believe he was a patriotic Muslim. When faced with the proud parents of a Muslim American soldier condemning Trump's bigotries they can only presume that the parents are themselves malevolent. It is the essence of what Trump has unleashed. It is not just the things he says and his willingness to traffic in vile white supremacist conspiracy theories from "birtherism" to Mexican "rapists" to Muslims as a malevolent force: He has acted as megaphone for those conspiracies, and has given mainstream urgency to voices previously relegated to the movement's worst fever swamps.
This is his movement. He built it, he crafted it, he retweeted it, and he dared the party to go against it. And even now, the party sits at the sidelines while agents and advisers of his campaign suggest the dead veteran whose parents spoke up against bigotry was probably himself a terrorist, with terrorist parents.
This is a dead political party. Whatever ideology it once had has been swept aside on Trump's behalf, and the new ideology is whatever Trump blurts out. If he's against trade deals now, so are they. If he doesn't like Mexican immigrants, then neither do they. If he believes all the military needs is a willingness to torture and a Great Leader like Donald Trump, so do they. There's no ideological force binding the party together other than what Trump himself provides: A racist base worked into conspiratorial froth. He didn't do that. It was broken when he got there, hobbled with everything from Steve King's anti-Latino vitriol to Tom Cotton's ISIS theories to Jade Freaking Helm. Trump just collected the pieces.
Will any one of them come out against what the Trump campaign has become? Will any one of them speak with appropriate fury over the notion that the Muslim American family is probably terrorist-linked after all, and their dead son a terrorist as well?
Not likely. Now Trump's campaign is seeking out support for his attacks on the Khan family on Capitol Hill. He doesn't want the story to go away—he's demanding the rest of the party support him in his attacks.
Meanwhile, an "open letter" to the Khan family from a conservative pundit at FoxNews.com chastises: "your religion of peace, Islam, is anything but" and "we don't plan on letting our country be devoured by Muslim maniacs."
A Washington Times columnist took to The Hill to praise their son while dismissing the human agency of what the father had to say. Khan's words against Trump's bigotries were part of a "political tradition of lying and distorting" and Khan was merely a tool, who "allowed himself to be tricked into it."
By the evening, Donald Trump was giving voice to the smears himself. “[Y]ou have radical Islamic terrorists probably all over the place, we’re allowing them to come in by the thousands and thousands. And I think that’s what bothered Mr. Khan more than anything else.”
As we keep saying, Donald Trump is the party now. There is no other.