Saturday, September 12, 2026
Opinion | Trump Catastrophically Miscalculated in Georgia - The New York Times
Trump Catastrophically Miscalculated in Georgia
"When a political player starts drawing personal insults from President Trump and his people, it is a pretty good sign that his star is on the rise.
For Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, that moment arrived this summer. In July, Mr. Trump dubbed the fresh-faced lawmaker “Pee-wee Herman.” The next month, upset over Mr. Ossoff’s criticism of the president, one aide called Mr. Ossoff a “feminine theater kid” and a “lightweight loser,” and another derided him as “a miserable person” and “the biggest cuck loser in politics,” while deploying a sexually explicit moniker unfit for a family-friendly publication.
Mr. Ossoff gives as good as he gets. Maybe better. He has derided Mr. Trump as “a failed president,” “a national disgrace” and a “draft-dodging crook.” This anti-Trump feistiness has boosted the senator’s standing in his party and turbocharged his re-election campaign. Once talked about as the most vulnerable Democratic senator of the cycle, he is now being talked up as a hot presidential possibility for 2028.
If Mr. Ossoff winds up in the White House, Mr. Trump will have largely himself to blame. The president didn’t just help him win his seat. He also spent years undermining the Republican Party in Georgia, sowing internecine discord, championing losing candidates and destroying conservative voters’ faith in the electoral system. With impressive, if unintentional, drive, Mr. Trump has fostered the conditions that transformed Mr. Ossoff from a charmingly nerdy, vaguely awkward, low-key freshman lawmaker into a political star.
Not all of it is Mr. Trump’s fault. Demographics have partly driven Georgia’s political turn from red to purple. The state’s populace is young, and a growing majority belongs to racial or ethnic minority groups. Republicans cannot win statewide contests simply by turning out the MAGA base. And over the past decade-plus, Democratic organizers, including Stacey Abrams and her New Georgia Project, have done yeoman’s labor mobilizing the blue team.
But the president has done much to speed the shift. Most famously, his election fraud lunacy after losing the state in 2020 depressed Republican turnout and cost the party both Senate seats in runoffs held in January 2021. This tipped control of the chamber to the Democrats, a mark of shame that sat poorly with many Georgia Republicans.
Mr. Trump’s ensuing feud with Gov. Brian Kemp, a fellow Republican who refused to help overturn the state’s 2020 election results, greased the state party’s slide into extremism and obsolescence. The rise of MAGA elevated the far right, most prominently the Georgia Republican Assembly, a grass-roots group that has feuded fiercely with more mainstream Republicans and pushed to impose arbitrary purity testson candidates. In 2023, the group unsuccessfully pressed the state party to pass a rule blocking candidates from running who were insufficiently conservative or traitors to the party. (This of course included Mr. Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, the state’s secretary of state, who refused to “find” Mr. Trump 11,780 extra votes.)
As Team MAGA took over the state party apparatus, Mr. Kemp and other elected leaders distanced themselves from it, creating parallel fund-raising and voter turnout machines. The state G.O.P. got bogged down in niche issues, such as a crusade for paper ballots, that are not top-of-mind concerns even for most Republican voters.
Republican elected officials now view the state party not as an organ for helping get them elected so much as one aimed at litigating grievances against G.O.P. officials and candidates deemed insufficiently MAGA, party operatives have told me.
Mr. Trump himself continues meddling, despite having displayed a reverse Midas touch in statewide races. In the 2022 midterms, his preferred candidates lost their primaries for governor, secretary of state, attorney general and insurance commissioner. Herschel Walker, Mr. Trump’s pick to face Senator Raphael Warnock, won the primary but lost the general.
Mr. Trump narrowly carried Georgia in 2024. But less than two years later, his approval numbers are deep underwater there. In this summer’s primary, his pick for governor, Burt Jones, lost to the businessman Rick Jackson.
As for this year’s Senate race, Republicans had aggressively courted Mr. Kemp to take on Mr. Ossoff. He declined. Allies of his told me at the time that he decided it was not worth another brutal statewide campaign — with at best grudging acceptance by a president and a MAGA movement that had long vilified him — to be just another member of the party’s Senate roster. And so the G.O.P. was left to pick from a constellation of lesser lights.
Enter Mike Collins, the Trump-backed horse in the race. The hard-right representative emerged from a nasty G.O.P. primary tarnished by scandal, short on campaign cash, polling well behind Mr. Ossoff and facing grave doubts among many Republicans in the state that he can turn things around. Mr. Collins isn’t really an anti-establishment outsider; his father was a House member. But he rocks the middle-finger swagger and the country-fried good-ol’-boy shtick — complete with a mullet, his critics marvel — that tends to thrill the MAGA base. Many big-money donors are skeptical of him, and he is expected to be a hard sell among the more traditional Republicans, independents and swing voters who determine statewide races.
Mr. Collins’s scandals and missteps have not helped. Several people in his orbit, including his son-in-law, have been chummy with white nationalists, publicly promoted white nationalism or been otherwise accused of antisemitic behavior. Rather than swiftly addressing the dust-up within his family, Mr. Collins refused to answer questions and allowed the mess to drag on for weeks before firmly declaring himself not a racist.
The representative is also under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations that his office misspent taxpayer funds on a no-show paid internship for the girlfriend of his longtime chief of staff, Brandon Phillips. (Mr. Collins has denied impropriety.)
Compounding the awkwardness, Mr. Collins fired Mr. Phillips in May, in response to the aide’s offensive posting on social media. Then the representative had to replace his subsequent chief of staff, Kip Talley, because of his participation in a group chat that included Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, notorious white nationalists. Even the party’s nominee for governor, Mr. Jackson, is keeping a healthy distance from Mr. Collins.
This all serves to fuel the emerging mythos of Mr. Ossoff. The 39-year-old senator — still the youngest in the chamber — stands poised to romp to re-election in a state made more purple by Mr. Trump’s machinations. Better still, Mr. Ossoff’s choirboy looks and often earnest demeanor, coupled with his taste for political combat and his social media savvy, give him an edge in the political mud pits. He can land some pretty rough insults without coming across as nasty or extreme.
In June, my colleague Michelle Goldberg noted that Mr. Ossoff seemed to have been cooked up in a lab as the perfect Democratic candidate for 2028. The rich irony is that Mr. Trump has been a — maybe even the — most important cook.
Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration. @mcottle "
How Trump Is Wielding Power to Stifle Speech
How Trump Is Wielding Power to Stifle Speech
“President Trump uses federal agencies and lawsuits to restrict press freedoms, including Justice Department subpoenas, Pentagon actions against Stars and Stripes, and FCC and FTC investigations. Critics report diminished freedom; allies claim accountability.
President Trump has harnessed agencies across the government to curtail press freedoms, a sweeping campaign that free speech advocates say will have lasting effects.
The Justice Department has sent F.B.I. agents to reporters’ homes to serve subpoenas and, in at least one case, flashed a warrant to seize devices. The Pentagon has fired the editor and publisher of its traditionally independent newspaper, Stars and Stripes, and blocked access to other journalists who refused to sign pledges that would limit their reporting.
Regulatory agencies are using their powers to pressure media organizations over their content. The administration has stripped funding from public television and radio. Angry over stories he does not like, President Trump has sued major news organizations and the White House has taken control of the previously independent press pool that tracks the president, deciding which outlets can participate.
Almost 20 months into Mr. Trump’s second term, his long-running media clashes have grown into a sweeping campaign to control speech in America that stands out for applying so many levers, so fast, all at once.
Driven by personal pique, fury over leaks and a determination to shape the political narrative to his advantage, Mr. Trump is deploying the might of the federal government and filing personal lawsuits — targeting not just journalists and liberal critics, but also comedians and talk show hosts, and the corporate entities behind them.
To the president and his allies, he is simply demanding accountability for what he casts as biased, unfair and sometimes inaccurate coverage and criticism — an effort that has been welcomed by longtime conservative press critics like those at the Media Research Center.
Aides noted that the White House has this year expanded who gets invited to cover events, such as the off-the-record presidential lunch with network anchors that precedes the annual State of the Union address.
In a statement, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said that “biased reporting from the media is a disservice to the American people,” adding: “We utilize every tool available to ensure that accurate reporting is provided to the public and the stain of those who knowingly peddle false information is held accountable.”
Free speech advocates say the president’s intent is apparent: to punish, intimidate and silence dissenters.
“There’s not a week that goes by where they’re not taking a new step to curtail press freedom in the country,” said Clayton Weimers, the executive director of the North America division of Reporters Without Borders. “We have measured a substantial diminishment of press freedoms.”
When challenged in court, the president and the administration have frequently lost, confronted with strongly worded rulings from judges affirming First Amendment rights.
Still, even the path to legal victory can have severe financial and reputational costs for those he views as adversaries, which have included The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC. And each time the president assails what has long been considered protected speech, media analysts say, he is eroding norms and undercutting the role of an independent press.
Reporters Without Borders maintains an index that tracks press freedom in 180 countries, clocking governmental threats, subpoenas and the vindictive use of regulations against journalists. The United States now ranks at its lowest since the organization started the index in 2002 — 64th, just above Panama and just below Botswana. The trend is the same at similar indexes kept by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the V-Dem Institute of Sweden.
There is a long record of U.S. presidents taking steps to curtail speech. President Woodrow Wilson imposed strict censorship and forced dissenting publishers out of business during World War I. Richard M. Nixon kept an enemies list, and his aides threatened F.C.C. action against broadcasters. More recently, the George W. Bush White House expanded government secrecy and the Obama administration went after the sources of journalists through leak investigations.
Mr. Trump had inveighed against the Biden administration for what he and his supporters portrayed as draconian pressure on social media companies to censor disfavored content often at their expense, promising at his second inauguration to “stop all government censorship.”
Now his administration is breaking new ground in stifling dissent with personal lawsuits and novel uses of executive power, longtime First Amendment lawyers say, with implications that extend far beyond Mr. Trump’s presidency.
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“We live in a different world under this administration because the threats are so grave,” said Floyd Abrams, who has worked on free speech cases for 60 years. “It’s one thing to say there’s an extraordinarily powerful First Amendment, but unless and until courts rule on these matters, the threat is very real.”
Harnessing Government Power
Long before he took office, Mr. Trump was well known for his media feuds. As a developer and reality TV star, he was quick to threaten defamation suits against those who challenged his assertions about his business successes and his wealth.
Mr. Trump has been candid about his aim: to inflict pain, even if it was fleeting. After bringing a failed libel suit against the former Times reporter Timothy L. O’Brien, whose book “TrumpNation” estimated Mr. Trump to be worth far less than he claimed, the president gloated about forcing the publisher to spend money. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about,” he said.
In his first term, the president branded journalists as “fake news” and crudely attacked reporters, especially women.
In his second term, Mr. Trump is now imprinting his pugilistic approach across the machinery of the federal government. Those who once might have checked him have been replaced by loyalists who often use their power to fulfill Mr. Trump’s desire to punish perceived enemies.
Soon after his inauguration, the White House banned The Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One, ostensibly because the wire service would not call the Gulf of Mexico by Mr. Trump’s preferred name, the Gulf of America. Another reason for the ban: The A.P. would not give the Trump team rights to its photo of Mr. Trump, bloodied with a raised fist, after he was shot in Butler, Pa., in 2024. At a private lunch with Mr. Trump and network anchors last year, White House aides tied the A.P. ban to the denial of the rights to the photo, according to two people briefed on the event.
Mr. Trump’s team is unapologetic about its goal of achieving firmer control over the national information environment — what Mr. Cheung, the communications director, has dubbed in a social media post, “Full Spectrum Dominance.”
Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and one of the most aggressive supporters of Mr. Trump’s efforts, has said that the president is “reshaping the media landscape.”
Citing the big broadcast networks, Mr. Carr told an interviewer for CNBC last year that “for years government officials just allowed those entities, with executives sitting in Hollywood and New York, to dictate the political narrative.” Mr. Trump, he added, has “fundamentally changed the game.”
One of the Trump administration’s strategies appeared to take root in a dispute between Elon Musk and the liberal press watchdog group Media Matters for America.
In 2023, Mr. Musk was furious about a Media Matters article that showed pro-Nazi posts were running on his social media platform X alongside promotional posts from major consumer brands, contributing to an advertiser exodus from the site.
A longtime Trump adviser, Stephen Miller, took to X to pointedly note that Republican state attorneys general had the power to consider civil and criminal fraud charges against the group. In short order, Mr. Musk sued Media Matters for allegedly manipulating the X algorithm to produce its results, the Texas attorney general’s office opened an investigation into deceptive trade practices and the Missouri attorney general followed with its own inquiry.
Media Matters won court injunctions blocking the Texas and Missouri investigations. But soon after Mr. Trump took office again, the Federal Trade Commission, newly headed by the conservative lawyer Andrew Ferguson, began its own investigation, demanding internal documents related to Media Matters’ methodology for evaluating media sources and its finances.
The investigation was part of a broader F.T.C. inquiry into whether several groups that work to identify online disinformation were colluding with advertising firms to direct money away from disfavored outlets. Conservatives saw the issue as central to what some labeled a “censorship industrial complex.”
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A federal judge in Washington ultimately determined that the F.T.C.’s investigation of Media Matters presented “a straightforward First Amendment violation.”
But the fight was costly for Media Matters. In addition to paying legal fees, the group said it had self-censored articles to avoid further scrutiny from the agency. (It is still defending itself against Mr. Musk’s suit.)
The F.T.C. also investigated NewsGuard, a site that rates the reliability of online information. It is avowedly nonpartisan in its approach; Fox News, for instance, rates above MS NOW.
In court papers, NewsGuard said it drew attention in part because it had given a low rating to the conservative site Newsmax, which is run by an ally of Mr. Trump’s, Chris Ruddy. Mr. Ruddy had complained that ad agencies were relying on NewsGuard ratings to withhold money from right-leaning outlets like his.
The F.T.C. took another tack that NewsGuard said affected it directly, related to the merger of two of the country’s largest advertising holding companies, Omnicom and Interpublic Group. The F.T.C. entered into a consent decreewith the newly joined company barring it from broadly using ratings like those published by NewsGuard to withhold ad spending from certain sites, among other things. (It could still follow individual clients’ requests to do so.)
In a lawsuit filed in February, NewsGuard said the provision effectively placed it on a blacklist, immediately causing it to lose business.
The F.T.C. ultimately dropped its investigations into both NewsGuard and Media Matters, saying it had achieved its goal of defending free speech through agreements with ad firms. It said it was fulfilling its mission of protecting consumers from anticompetitive behavior that “distorted the marketplace of ideas,” as Mr. Ferguson put it.
Dan Schneider, vice president for free speech at the conservative watchdog group Media Research Center, described the actions by the F.T.C. and the F.C.C. as a correction against abuses under the past two Democratic presidents. “Please, let’s not forget history and rewrite everything that went on before,” Mr. Schneider said.
But Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Democratic F.T.C. commissioner fired by Mr. Trump last year, said in an interview that the agency’s actions “a perversion of the F.T.C.’s authorities in order to punish the speech of perceived enemies and reward perceived allies.”
‘Deeply Un-American’
Much of the administration’s action has been led by Mr. Carr. The longtime F.C.C. lawyer is known to frequent the president’s golf clubs when Mr. Trump is there on weekends and often speaks to the president directly about his grievances with news outlets, according to people briefed on their conversations.
He has bent the F.C.C. to the president’s will, investigating the major broadcast networks by reviving largely dormant rules, like those against so-called news distortion — meant to punish the deliberate staging or distortion of a news event. Mr. Carr has also pursued networks for their diversity, equity and inclusion practices, inquiring whether they violate federal law and agency regulations, a tactic the administration has used to significant effect against universities and law firms.
Early on, Mr. Carr extracted extraordinary concessions from Skydance, the company run by the studio executive David Ellison, the son of the billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison, as it sought to purchase Paramount, the parent company of CBS. To secure F.C.C. approval for the merger, Skydance agreedto end CBS’s diversity policies and appoint a monitor for news bias. (Mr. Trump has since shown a rooting interest in the Ellisons’ attempt to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN.)
Critics, among them F.C.C. chairs from past Republican administrations, have said Mr. Carr is exceeding his authority. Mr. Carr says he is simply following the law by requiring broadcasters to serve the public interest in ways that he says his predecessors had failed to do.
Mr. Trump is clearly pleased with Mr. Carr’s effort to solve the so-called fake news problem, as he put it in a speech in April at a private White House event ahead of the celebrations for America’s 250th anniversary.
“He’s keeping these crooked networks honest,” Mr. Trump said as he spotted Mr. Carr in the crowd, describing his appointee as “the most powerful man in the world.”
After Mr. Trump recently called for punishment of the NBC host Kristen Welker for reporting he did not like, and suggested F.C.C. action against the airing of “fake polls,” Mr. Carr responded by saying the agency was considering “a lot of actions,” including on “fake polls.”
No network has borne the brunt of the president’s ire as much as the Disney-owned ABC network.
Mr. Trump’s animus against ABC grew in 2024, when he sued over the anchor George Stephanopoulos’s characterization of the verdict in the defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll, who accused Mr. Trump of sexual abuse. ABC settled the suit for $15 million.
In the president’s second term, his anger has increased as the ABC late-night comic Jimmy Kimmel has made him the regular butt of jokes.
Last year, the F.C.C. opened an investigation into the network’s diversity and inclusion hiring policies and revived a conservative group’s complaint over ABC’s 2024 presidential debate.
Early this year, the agency sought to require its talk show “The View” to follow so-called equal-time rules for political candidates, even though the F.C.C. previously agreed that the show qualified for an exemption.
In April, after Mr. Trump and the first lady demanded ABC fire Mr. Kimmelover a joke he made about her being an “expectant widow,” the F.C.C. started an early review of the federal licenses that ABC stations need to operate, years before they are set to expire.
The agency had never brought such a mass challenge to a major network’s station licenses. It said it was doing so because ABC was deficient in its responses to the diversity and inclusion inquiry.
ABC is now fighting the agency’s actions, which it called “deeply un-American.”
The network has asked a federal court to intervene immediately, arguing that Mr. Carr was effectively using the agency’s enforcement process to wage a “retaliatory campaign” that is already negatively affecting its programming decisions.
Out of fear of retaliation, ABC decided to carry live online a prime-time speech that Mr. Trump gave on election security, which it would not have otherwise done, and avoided certain bookings and video clips on “The View,” the network said in court papers.
It also reported onerous F.C.C. demands for documents, including staff communications from inside “The View” and internal ABC News editorial policies.
“It’s unprecedented to seek these records because they are part of the editorial decision-making,” Anna Gomez, the lone Democratic F.C.C. commissioner, said in an interview. “It’s all a strategy, and tools, to intimidate broadcasters into submission.”
Mr. Carr has called ABC’s suit meritless. This month, the F.C.C. moved to get the case dismissed, arguing ABC was simply trying to short-circuit an agency investigation while exaggerating harms to its speech rights.
Trevor Timm, the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit group that tracks press freedom violations in the United States, said that the administration’s moves “have certainly risen to the level where they’re kind of off the charts.”
Government efforts to subpoena journalists and chill their reporting through threats are at the highest level since the foundation started tracking incidents in 2017.
And as a private citizen, Mr. Trump has filed lawsuits against a wide range of targets including the Guardian newspaper, the journalist Bob Woodward and the Pulitzer Prize board — legal battles often financed by his donor-funded political action committee.
Many of the moves have also drawn stern rebukes and concern from judges.
That was the case after the F.B.I. served a search warrant in January at the home of a Washington Post reporter and seized several of her devices, as part of an investigation into a contractor’s handling of classified material. In February, Judge William B. Porter chastised the government and forbade officials from immediately reviewing the reporter’s materials, saying to do otherwise would be “the equivalent of leaving the government’s fox in charge of The Washington Post’s henhouse.”
While weighing a suit Mr. Trump has personally brought against The Des Moines Register for a poll it published showing him behind in Iowa in 2024, a judge worried that allowing the suit to proceed could have “a massive, chilling effect.”
After a judge harshly questioned government lawyers in July over subpoenas for phone records and testimony from Times journalists who reported on the security capabilities of the new Qatari-donated Air Force One jet, the Justice Department withdrew the subpoenas.
At the time, David McCraw, the paper’s top newsroom lawyer, called the outcome, “an important affirmation of our country’s commitment to a free press,” but added in a statement that the subpoenas “should never have been issued in the first place.”
In siding with The Times in a challenge to restrictions for reporters at the Pentagon, Judge Paul Friedman of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in March, “Those who drafted the First Amendment believed that the nation’s security requires a free press and an informed people and that such security is endangered by governmental suppression of political speech.”
After The Times initially prevailed in court, Pentagon officials sidestepped the ruling to again limit the access of journalists to the building. The Times sued again. This time, an appellate panel allowed a key new restriction to stand, at least temporarily — reporters must have escorts inside the Pentagon where they once roamed freely.
The rule remains in place while the legal fight presses on.
Jim Rutenberg is a writer at large for The Times and The New York Times Magazine and writes most often about media and politics.
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.”
Friday, September 11, 2026
After 9/11, Islamophobia Shaped a Generation of Muslim New Yorkers
After 9/11, Islamophobia Shaped a Generation of Muslim New Yorkers
“The attacks unleashed a wave of hate, but the years since have seen Muslim Americans’ political and cultural influence grow.
Once-friendly neighbors started to keep their distance. Undercover police officers began to monitor community events. And passers-by would give them dirty looks on the street, and sometimes harass them, when they left home in hijabs or other religious garb.
Many American Muslims have faced a quarter-century of suspicion and hostility since the Sept. 11 attacks, which reshaped life for all Americans.
In New York, a generation of Muslim New Yorkers responded to the Islamophobia by organizing their communities: Mosques hosted makeshift legal clinics. Small businesses became hubs in a citywide civil rights network. Muslims of different racial, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds formed alliances the city had not seen before.
Their political organizing helped, years later, to elect the city’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani. But anti-Muslim prejudice still endures, echoing the Islamophobia that arose in the earliest days after Sept. 11.
Murad Awawdeh was 14 in September 2001. The post-9/11 backlash, and the grass-roots response of his friends and neighbors, led him to trade his biochemistry studies — and his mother’s American dream of having a doctor in the family — for a career in civil rights.
“I think that day belongs to everyone who lived it and what came after belongs to a smaller group of us,” said Mr. Awawdeh, 39, who is now the president and chief executive of the New York Immigration Coalition and a confidant of Mr. Mamdani. “That part of the story this country still has not told itself honestly.”
The Sept. 11 attacks left many Muslim American communities scarred by heavy-handed law enforcement tactics and the suspicion, if not outright hostility, of classmates, co-workers, elected officials and cable news commentators who blamed all Muslims for the terrorism they, too, had experienced that day. That experience spurred many to take political action.
“If you look at prior to 9/11, for the most part, Muslim Americans were not politically involved,” said Afaf Nasher, the executive director of the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. But, she added, “When you’re pushed against the wall, you’re either going to run in fear or you’re going to push back, and political empowerment was certainly one way that we are pushing back.”
The ascendance of Mr. Mamdani has turned New York into perhaps the most prominent example of American Muslim success in the post-9/11 world. But the history of the city since the attacks has also highlighted the many challenges that Muslims in the United States continue to face.
Those include a history of police surveillance, backlash faced by high-profile Muslims in politics or the arts, and attacks on Islamic religious expression, including the construction of mosques and the wearing of religious clothinglike hijabs. Those biases have also affected followers of other faiths, in particular observant Sikh men, whose turbans are often mistaken for a form of Islamic dress.
Such sentiments have compounded in many ways since the start of the war in Gaza, which most Muslim Americans have vigorously opposed. Opponents of that war have been accused of terrorist sympathies, and some, including the Columbia University protester Mahmoud Khalil, have been arrested and threatened with deportation for their advocacy. That has led some Muslims to say the war in Gaza has created an environment akin to the months and years after Sept. 11, when Muslim Americans feared they could be marked as terrorist sympathizers for speaking out against the war on terror.
After Sept. 11, many Muslims in New York found themselves under covert police surveillance. Asad Dandia, 33, a public historian, was a plaintiff in a 2013 class-action lawsuit against the Police Department over its surveillance of the city’s Muslim neighborhoods, a program that was assisted by the Central Intelligence Agency.
He had come under police surveillance after starting a charity as a teenager to feed poor families in his neighborhood. The police spying program was exposed in 2011 and caused a public uproar that led to its ending by 2018 after a series of legal settlements and other initiatives.
Today, Mr. Dandia is the official historian of the borough of Brooklyn and an informal adviser to Mr. Mamdani. One of his lawyers in the 2013 lawsuit, Ramzi Kassem, is the mayor’s chief legal counsel.
“We went in the span of 10 years from suing the government to being the government,” Mr. Dandia said. “And I think that is a classic and quintessential New York and American story.”
Mr. Mamdani is one of several Muslims who have become prominent in American public life in recent years. Others include U.S. Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, the Academy Award-winning actor Mahershala Ali, the model Bella Hadid and the comedians Ramy Youssef and Hasan Minhaj.
“Muslim America now has a greater cultural footprint, more institutional power and a lot more support from allies, comrades and friends all throughout the country,” Mr. Dandia said. “Now when people think of Muslim America, they have names and faces they can point to.”
But despite these successes, many challenges remain. Mr. Mamdani, who was 9 years old on Sept. 11, has said the Islamophobic backlash to the attack lingered and “became a fact of life.”
According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted this year, 43 percent of American adults said Muslims are less patriotic than other Americans, and 42 percent said Muslim Americans are having a negative impact on the country. When asked to explain their views, respondents often cited the Sept. 11 attacks.
By some measures, the survey showed that public attitudes toward Islam were more negative now than they were immediately after the attacks. In March 2002, 25 percent of American adults said Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence, but that number had risen to 51 percent in the survey conducted this year.
Those views have become highly polarized, with Republicans expressing far more negative views of Islam than Democrats, a change from after the attacks when supporters of both parties held similar views. Today, anti-Muslim sentiments have surged anew in some parts of the country with almost every election cycle.
Donald J. Trump campaigned for president in 2016 on a pledge to bar immigrants from Muslim countries and has restricted immigration from those nations and others that he views negatively during both his first and second administrations. In his second term, Mr. Trump has cracked down on students and universities over protests against the war in Gaza, portraying student demonstrators as supporters of terrorism and equating their arguments with antisemitic hate speech.
That has included the arrest of young Muslim activists, including Mr. Khalil, a Columbia University protest leader, and Rumeysa Ozturk, who helped write an opinion piece critical of Israel for the student newspaper at Tufts University.
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, a professor of religion and politics at Washington University in St. Louis, said the embrace of Islamophobia by the Trump administration posed a serious threat to Muslim Americans. But for Americans who are skeptical or critical of Mr. Trump, it may have also helped to undermine anti-Muslim arguments.
“People forget now the degree to which Islamophobia was not something that was just on the right but was present on both sides,” Mr. GhaneaBassiri said.
As an example of the reaction to Mr. Trump’s policies, he pointed to protests at airports against the president’s immigration restrictions in 2017 as a moment that “kind of shocked” some Muslim activists and organizations. They had become accustomed to pushing for their rights with few allies and little positive coverage in the news media, but the airport protests were filled with non-Muslims.
“Before that moment, if they criticized the state, their loyalty was always questioned by people on both the right and the left,” Mr. GhaneaBassiri said.
But in New York, Mr. Mamdani’s election has shown the resilience of anti-Muslim suspicion in both parties.
During last year’s mayoral campaign, Mr. Mamdani was accused of supporting terrorism by critics in both parties, including the campaign of former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, his main opponent in the race, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who apologized after she falsely claimed in an interview that he had made “references to global jihad.”
The hate is nothing new to the mayor’s allies. Shahana Hanif, who in 2021 was elected the first Muslim woman to the City Council, was in elementary school when the attacks took place. She came of age as American policy and cultural attitudes shifted against the nation’s Muslims.
At age 10, she wrote a letter to President George W. Bush asking him to put a stop to the hate that seemed to engulf so much of the country. For Ms. Hanif, a Bangladeshi native of Kensington, Brooklyn, it was an early form of political organizing that helped inform her political career decades later, particularly as her own neighborhood evolved to produce the city’s first Muslim city councilwoman.
“Seeing the injustice my community experienced” propelled her into progressive political organizing, Ms. Hanif said. “I can’t take away the Muslim part of it and just say, ‘Oh, no, this is only happening to us because we’re Bangladeshi immigrants,’ or ‘this is only happening to us because I’m a daughter of immigrants or I’m a woman of color,’” she said. “That association of being Muslim is certainly part of it.”
New York’s Muslim political and civil rights leaders said they also see opportunities to keep building on their post-9/11 organizing work, not just for other members of their faith but for the next group that may be targeted.
Ms. Nasher, the executive director of CAIR, said that her group and others like it see their efforts as an outgrowth of the discrimination they faced and a way to guard against it happening to others.
“That’s not just because we’re Muslim — it’s because we’re American,” she said. “And you would think that as our fellow Americans, people would want every American to be politically engaged.”
Liam Stack is a Times reporter who covers the culture and politics of the New York City region.
Maya King is a Times reporter who writes about the intersection of politics, religion and ritual in New York City.“
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