What Bush Understood That Trump Doesn’t

T he current New York City mayor , Zohran Mamdani, has affronted one of his predecessors, Rudy Giuliani, by taking the inflammatory step of deciding to attend the city’s 9/11 commemoration.

“It offends me,” Giuliani proclaimed earlier this week on Newsmax.

One might suspect that the nature of Mamdani’s offense lay in his being a politician who is associating himself with a day that Giuliani prefers to associate with Giuliani.

But the former mayor proceeded to lay out a much darker rationale.

“They’re taking over certain parts of America and certain parts of Europe.

They have every desire to take us over.

This is not ‘they want to be just another religion,’” he said of Muslims.

“Mamdani is a clear, a clear supporter of that.

All of the Muslims he supports are murderers!” Like many of Giuliani’s utterances, this one has no connection to reality.

Yet his assertion that Mamdani harbors some secret desire to conquer the United States in the name of Islam, that his religion is the skeleton key to a web of sinister motivations, is now treated on the right as almost banal.

A quarter century after 9/11, delirious anti-Muslim bigotry is almost routine in the political rhetoric of many conservatives.

T he conventional account of Donald Trump’s political career explains his rise to power as a populist revolt against Republican orthodoxy.

The GOP elite had lost touch with their base by endorsing immigration reform, free trade, or forever wars in the Middle East, which created an opening that Trump exploited. [ Read: What the Islamophobic attacks on Mamdani reveal ] That story is largely true, but it misses an important issue.

The President George W.