The Lies of a Coward: How Trump Projects His Own Monstrosity Onto Islam

Note to readers: What follows is written from the heart of a Muslim father, an Arab man raising two daughters in a world that too often judges us by the lies told about us. I write not as a scholar, though I have consulted the scholars. I write not as a politician, though I have watched the politicians. I write as a father who has held his newborn daughters and whispered the adhan in their ears, who has watched them grow, who has taught them that Islam honors them, that their Creator cherishes them, that no man - no matter how powerful - can diminish what Allah has made noble. These are my words. The truth is my witness.

THE MAN WHO SPEAKS FROM THE GUTTER

A Father’s Duty to Speak

I am writing this on a night when sleep will not come. My daughters are asleep in their rooms, their faces peaceful, their dreams still innocent of the hatred that swirls in the world outside. In the morning, I will make them breakfast. I will help them with their homework. I will kiss their foreheads before they leave for school. And I will pray - as I pray every day - that the lies told about our faith will not reach them. That the ignorance will not wound them. That the world will see them as I see them: as gifts from Allah, as lights in my life, as human beings deserving of dignity and respect.

But tonight, I cannot be silent. Because a man who holds the most powerful office in the world has once again opened his mouth to spew hatred against us. And I have learned, as a father, that silence in the face of lies is a betrayal of the ones you love.

His name is Donald Trump. And he is a liar.

I do not use that word lightly. In Islam, lying is a grave sin. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, taught us that lying leads to wickedness and that wickedness leads to the fire. But there is also a duty to speak truth, even when it is bitter. And the truth is this: Donald Trump has made a career of lying about Muslims, about our faith, about our women, about our families. He does it because it is easy. He does it because there are people who will believe him. He does it because he has spent his entire life projecting his own moral filth onto others.

The Congresswoman and the Lie

In November 2025, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social - his digital echo chamber, his palace of grievance - a series of lies about Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Somali-American Muslim woman who has served in the United States House of Representatives since 2019 . He wrote: “Ilhan Omar, always wrapped in her swaddling hijab, and who probably came into the USA illegally in that you are not allowed to marry your brother, does nothing but hatefully complain about our country” .

“Swaddling hijab.” Let me pause on those words for a moment. The hijab that Trump describes with such contempt is the same hijab that my wife wears, that my mother wore, that the women in my family wear as an act of devotion to Allah. It is a garment of modesty, of dignity, of identity. To mock it is to mock the women who choose it. To call it “swaddling” - as if Muslim women are infants, as if we are children who need to be wrapped and controlled - is to reveal a mind that cannot comprehend the depth of a faith that honors women.

But the lie about her marriage is worse.

The claim that Ilhan Omar married her brother to gain entry to the United States has been circulating for years. It originated in anonymous online forums and was amplified by political opponents who could find no legitimate ground on which to attack her . Fact-checkers at The New York Times, the Associated Press, and multiple independent organizations have investigated the claim and found it to be baseless .

Let me lay out the facts, because facts matter, and men who trade in lies rely on our forgetting them.

Ilhan Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1982. She fled the country’s civil war with her family, spending four years in a refugee camp in Kenya before immigrating to the United States as a child in 1995 . She became a United States citizen in 2000 at the age of eighteen. She was educated in American schools, attended North Dakota State University, and built a career in public service before being elected to Congress.

In 2009, she married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in a civil ceremony. According to Minnesota marriage records, Elmi is three years younger than Omar. When the rumor that Elmi was her brother first emerged in 2016, Omar addressed it directly, calling it “absolutely false and ridiculous” . She provided her marital history, including documentation that she had obtained a religious divorce in 2011.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune, which investigated the claim in 2018, reported that Omar showed a reporter cellphone images of documents from her family’s entry into the United States in 1995. The documents listed her father and siblings by order of birth, with Omar listed as the youngest of seven children. Ahmed Nur Said Elmi’s name did not appear in the documents .

In 2019, after Trump first made the claim, The New York Times delved into the allegations and concluded that “no proof has emerged substantiating these claims” .

The lie has been debunked. It has been investigated. It has been disproven. And yet, in 2025, Donald Trump repeated it. Not because he believes it - no man who has seen the evidence could believe it - but because it works. It works to dehumanize a Muslim woman. It works to suggest that our families are corrupt, that our marriages are incestuous, that our people are so desperate to enter America that we would commit the gravest of sins.

I want to speak directly to Trump now, as a father, as a Muslim, as a man who knows his faith better than you will ever know anything of value.

You speak of marriage to brothers as if it is something we do. You speak of it as if it is normal for us. Let me tell you about my faith, you ignorant man. Islam prohibits marriage to close relatives. The Quran explicitly forbids marriage to mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, nieces - and yes, brothers . These are the same prohibitions found in the Torah, in the teachings of Jesus, in the moral codes of every civilized people. To suggest that Muslims would do what you claim is not only a lie about Ilhan Omar; it is a lie about Islam itself. It is a lie that reveals the filth in your own mind. Because when a man repeatedly accuses others of incest, of deviance, of moral monstrosity, it is not his accusers he is describing. It is himself.

The Other Lie: Eight Years Old

There is another lie that men like Trump tell about us. It surfaces in dark corners of the internet, in hate forums, in the mouths of those who would paint Islam as something foreign and monstrous. They say we marry eight-year-old girls. They say we condone the abuse of children. They say our Prophet, peace be upon him, set an example of something vile.

I will address this lie directly, because my daughters are not eight years old today, but they were once. And the thought of anyone - any man, anywhere - looking at an eight-year-old girl and seeing a potential wife is so monstrous, so beyond the pale of human decency, that it should be beneath rebuttal. But because the lie is told, and because there are people who believe it, I will answer.

In the 7th century Arabia into which the Prophet Muhammad was born, the world was a different place. The norms of marriage, of adulthood, of responsibility were not what they are today. To judge the 7th century by the standards of the 21st is not scholarship; it is sophistry. But even within that historical context, the marriage of the Prophet to Aisha - a marriage that is the subject of endless distortion by those who hate us - was a union that, by the accounts we have, was not consummated until she had reached physical maturity. The scholars of our tradition, across fourteen centuries, have understood that marriage is not valid without consent, without maturity, without the capacity for a woman to make her own choice.

But let me go further, because the lie that we abuse children is not only a distortion of history; it is a projection of the accuser’s own reality.

While Trump speaks of eight-year-old girls and Muslim men, let us remember who he has associated with. Let us remember the company he has kept. Let us open the files that the Justice Department has finally released - the files that Trump fought to keep secret, the files that bear witness to his relationship with one of the most notorious child predators in American history.

THE PROJECTION OF MONSTROSITY

The Epstein Files

In January 2026, the United States Department of Justice released approximately 3.5 million pages of documents related to the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender who died in federal custody in 2019 . The release came only after Congress passed a law compelling the Justice Department to make the files public - a law that Trump personally lobbied against .

What did those files contain? According to The New York Times, which reviewed more than 5,300 files containing references to Trump, the documents include:

• More than 38,000 references to Trump, his wife, his Mar-a-Lago club, and related terms
• FBI notes from interviews with Epstein’s victims, some of whom describe interactions with Trump
• A list of unverified sexual assault allegations against Trump compiled by FBI officials in August 2025
• An FBI document detailing an accusation by a woman who alleged that Trump raped her when she was thirteen years old
• Notes from an FBI interview in which one of Epstein’s victims stated that Ghislaine Maxwell - Epstein’s accomplice, now serving twenty years for sex trafficking - once “presented her” to Trump at a party and told her that Trump “liked” her

Let me repeat that, because the weight of it demands repetition. A woman told federal investigators that Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s partner in the sexual exploitation of minors, presented her to Donald Trump at a party and made clear to Trump that she was “available” .

The Justice Department, in a statement released with the files, claimed that the allegations against Trump were “untrue and sensationalist” and “unfounded and false” . But here is what the Justice Department did not say: they did not say the allegations were investigated. They did not say the FBI found them to be fabricated. They did not say the accusers were lying. They said, essentially, that because the allegations had not been “weaponized” against Trump, they must be false .

This is not how justice works. This is how power protects itself.

The Friendship That Would Not Be Denied

Trump has repeatedly claimed that he had little to do with Epstein, that they had a “falling out,” that he was never on Epstein’s plane . The files tell a different story.

Emails recovered from Epstein’s accounts show that as late as 2018, Epstein was referring to Trump in familiar terms. In a 2016 exchange with the journalist Michael Wolff, Epstein wrote, “Im thinking what would trump do” . When asked about Trump’s character, Epstein referred to him as “your friend” . The friendship was real, and it lasted far longer than Trump has admitted.

In 2002, Trump gave an interview to New York magazine that included a now-famous quote about Epstein. Asked about his friend, Trump said: “He’s a terrific guy. He likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side” .

“Younger side.” Let that phrase sit with you for a moment. Trump knew. He knew what Epstein was doing, and he called him a “terrific guy.” He knew the women were “on the younger side,” and he said it with a smile. This is not the language of a man who had cut ties with a predator. This is the language of a man who shared Epstein’s appetites.

The files also include evidence that Epstein’s victims were recruited from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent victims, told investigators that she was working at Mar-a-Lago as a teenager when she was recruited into Epstein’s circle . A woman who was trafficked by Epstein, whose life was destroyed by the men Epstein brought to her, began her journey at a club owned by Donald Trump.

And what did Trump do when he learned that Epstein had recruited a child from his property? Did he call the police? Did he warn the girl’s parents? Did he cut ties with the man who had preyed on one of his employees?

He called Epstein a “terrific guy” who liked women “on the younger side.”

The Lies They Tell About Us

Now you begin to understand why I say that Trump projects his own monstrosity onto Muslims. A man who has spent decades in the company of a child predator, who has been accused of rape by multiple women, who was found liable for sexual abuse by a jury in 2023 - this man looks at Muslims and tells the world that we marry children, that we marry our siblings, that we are the ones with twisted families and dark secrets .

This is what abusers do. They accuse others of the crimes they commit. They point fingers outward so that no one looks at their own hands. They create a narrative of monstrous others so that their own monstrosity goes unnoticed.

Trump knows this. He has built his political career on it.

When he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” in 2015, he was not making a policy proposal. He was branding us. He was telling the American people: these people are dangerous. These people are not like you. These people do not share your values. And in the branding, he was able to hide his own corruption, his own moral decay, his own secret history of association with the worst kind of predators .

When he told a rally crowd that “Islam hates us,” he was not speaking about a religion. He was preparing the ground for the dehumanization that would follow .

When he said that Muslims “don’t belong in American society” and called for “radical deportations of all mainstream Muslim legal and illegal immigrants” - when he said that “Muslims don’t belong in American society” - he was not expressing a political opinion . He was preparing to do to us what he has always done to those who threaten his sense of himself: destroy them, discredit them, drive them out.

THE TRUTH OF ISLAM

What We Actually Believe

I want to pause now and speak to you about my faith. Not as a scholar, not as an apologist, but as a father who has studied the Quran, who has taught his daughters the meaning of its verses, who has found in it the only light that has never failed.

Islam came into a world that buried daughters alive.

Let me repeat that, because it is important. In pre-Islamic Arabia - in the world before the revelation - the birth of a daughter was a tragedy. Fathers would hide themselves from their communities in shame when they received news of a daughter’s birth. Some of them, in the depths of their ignorance and despair, would bury their infant daughters in the sand .

The Quran addresses this directly. In Surah An-Nahl, Allah says:

“When one of them is given news of a female baby, his face darkens and he is filled with inward grief. He hides from his people because of the evil of what he has been given. Should he keep her in contempt or bury her in the dust? Evil is what they decide” .

And in Surah At-Takwir, on the Day of Judgment, Allah tells us that the buried girl will be asked: “For what sin were you killed?” .

This is the faith that Trump says “hates us.” This is the faith that, fourteen hundred years ago, commanded its followers to honor their daughters, to raise them with dignity, to answer to God for how they treated them. While the world buried baby girls alive, Islam said: she will be asked, and you will be asked, and the accounting will be just.

The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, taught his followers how to care for daughters. In a saying recorded by Imam Ahmad, the Prophet said: “Whoever has a daughter and does not bury her alive, does not insult her, and does not favor his son over her, Allah will enter him into paradise” .

In another saying, recorded by Muslim and al-Bukhari, the Prophet said: “Whoever maintains two daughters until they reach maturity, he and I will be like this on the Day of Resurrection” - and he held up two fingers together .

Do you understand what this means, you who speak of us as if we hate our own children? The Prophet, the best of creation, the mercy to the worlds, tells us that those who care for their daughters will be with him in paradise, as close as two fingers held together.

I have two daughters. When I read this hadith, I weep. Because I know that my love for them is not separate from my faith. It is my faith. The care I give them, the protection I offer them, the education I provide them - these are acts of worship. These are the paths to paradise.

The Rights of Women in Islam

Let me speak about the rights of women in Islam, because this is where the lies are thickest and where the truth is most beautiful.

Before Islam, women were inherited like property. When a man died, his male heirs would claim his widow as part of the inheritance, forcing her to marry one of them or preventing her from remarrying at all . The Quran ended this practice in a single verse:

“O you who believe, it is not lawful for you to inherit women by compulsion” .

Before Islam, women had no right to inheritance. The wealth of a family went only to male heirs. The Quran gave women the right to inherit - a right that did not exist in European law until the 19th century. Allah says:

“For men is a share of what the parents and close relatives leave, and for women is a share of what the parents and close relatives leave, be it little or much - an obligatory share” .

Before Islam, marriage was a transaction in which women had no voice. The Prophet taught that a woman’s consent is required for marriage. In a hadith recorded by Ahmad and Ibn Majah, a girl came to the Prophet and told him that her father had forced her to marry without her consent. The Prophet gave her the choice: she could accept the marriage or invalidate it. The girl said, “Actually, I accept this marriage, but I wanted to let women know that parents have no right to force a husband on them” .

Do you hear this, you who speak of us as if we oppress our women? Our women have rights that your civilization did not recognize until the last century. Our women have the right to choose their husbands, the right to own property, the right to inheritance, the right to education - and these rights were given to them fourteen hundred years ago, by a religion that you call “backward” and “oppressive.”

The Prophet taught that husbands must treat their wives with kindness. He said: “The best of you are those who are the kindest to their wives” . He said: “A believing man should not hate a believing woman; if he dislikes one of her characteristics, he would like another one” .

My wife is my partner, my comfort, my equal in faith. We walk this life together, raising our daughters, struggling and hoping and praying. When I look at her, I do not see a possession or a subordinate. I see someone whom Allah has placed beside me, someone whose rights are as sacred as my own, someone whose dignity I am commanded to protect.

This is Islam. This is what we believe. And no man - no matter how powerful, no matter how wealthy, no matter how many times he repeats his lies - can change what is true.

The Education of Daughters

There is a hadith that I have kept in my heart since the day my first daughter was born. The Prophet Muhammad said: “Seeking knowledge is mandatory for every Muslim” .

Not for every man. Not for every adult. For every Muslim. Male and female. Equal in the duty to learn, to grow, to understand the world that Allah has created.

When my daughters were born, I whispered the adhan in their right ears, as the Prophet taught us to do for all children. The first words they heard were “Allahu Akbar” - God is greatest. The call to prayer, the summons to knowledge, the invitation to a life of meaning.

I will educate my daughters. I will send them to school. I will encourage them to read, to question, to think. I will not favor my sons over my daughters, because in Islam, there is no favor. There is only responsibility.

The scholars of our tradition have always understood this. Women have been scholars, teachers, jurists, leaders throughout Islamic history. Aisha, the wife of the Prophet, was one of the greatest scholars of Islam, transmitting over two thousand hadiths and teaching the companions of the Prophet after his death. Fatima al-Fihri founded the University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco, in 859 CE - the oldest existing, continuously operating university in the world. Muslim women have been doctors, poets, mathematicians, astronomers, and leaders for more than a millennium.

This is what Trump does not know, what he will not know, because knowing would require him to see us as human. And seeing us as human would require him to see himself as we see him: a man who has spent his life in the company of predators, a man who has lied about the innocent, a man whose soul is so darkened that he must constantly invent monsters to feel, for a moment, like he is not the monster himself.

THE ACCOUNTING

Two Billion Voices

There are two billion Muslims in the world. Two billion. One out of every four human beings on this planet follows the faith that Trump has slandered, the Prophet he has mocked, the Book he has called violent and backward.

We are doctors and teachers, engineers and artists, farmers and shopkeepers, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. We live in every country, speak every language, represent every race and culture. We are the Muslim community of Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation in the world, a democracy of 270 million people. We are the Muslims of India, of Bangladesh, of Pakistan, of Turkey, of Egypt, of Nigeria, of Morocco, of Saudi Arabia. We are the Muslims of Europe, of America, of Brazil, of South Africa, of Australia.

We are not a monolith. We are not a stereotype. We are not the lies that Trump tells about us.

When he says that “Islam hates us,” he is speaking about two billion people. When he says that we marry our brothers, he is slandering two billion families. When he says that we abuse children, he is accusing two billion mothers and fathers of the most heinous crimes imaginable.

And what have we done to deserve this? We have prayed to the same God that Abraham prayed to, the God who spoke to Moses, the God who sent Jesus. We have believed in the same prophets, the same scriptures, the same moral foundations. We have loved our children, honored our parents, cared for our neighbors, given charity to the poor, just as the Christians and the Jews and the people of every faith have done.

The only crime we have committed is being visible. The only sin we have committed is refusing to disappear.

The Silence of the Good People

There are people in America - good people, decent people - who know that Trump’s words about us are lies. They know that Ilhan Omar did not marry her brother. They know that Muslim families love their daughters. They know that Islam is not a cult, not a sickness, not a threat to the American way of life.

And yet they remain silent.

I understand why. It is easier to say nothing. It is safer to look away. The politics of this moment are ugly, and speaking out against the president carries risks, and there are always more urgent causes, more immediate concerns, more pressing battles to fight.

But I want to speak to those good people now, from the heart of a father who is afraid for his daughters.

When you remain silent, you are not neutral. When you look away, you are not innocent. The hate that Trump speaks into the world does not disappear because you refuse to hear it. It finds its way into the schools where my daughters learn. It appears on the playground, in the words of children who have heard their parents repeating the lies. It shows up at the mosque, in the form of threats and vandalism and fear.

My daughters should not have to be brave. They should not have to explain to their classmates why their mother wears a hijab. They should not have to defend their father’s faith against lies told by the most powerful man in the world. They should be children. They should be safe. They should be able to go to school without fear, to walk down the street without being called names, to grow up believing that they are loved and valued and respected.

But they cannot be safe, because the good people are silent.

The Colonialist’s Mirror

There is a pattern to the hatred that Trump directs at us. It is not new. It is the same pattern that colonial powers have used for centuries to justify the subjugation of Muslim peoples.

The British used it in India, calling us backward and barbaric, justifying their rule with lies about our culture and our faith. The French used it in Algeria, telling themselves that they were bringing civilization to a savage people, that the religion we practiced was a barrier to progress. The Israelis use it today, claiming that the occupation of Palestinian land is a defense against a culture that does not value life, that does not love its children, that does not understand peace.

The pattern is always the same: dehumanize, then destroy. Make the people seem less than human, so that violence against them becomes acceptable. Tell lies about their families, their marriages, their children, so that the world will not mourn when they are bombed, displaced, imprisoned, killed.

Trump’s lies about Ilhan Omar are not just about one woman. They are part of a larger project: to make Muslims seem so foreign, so monstrous, so incapable of civilization, that anything done to us is justified. When he says that we marry our brothers, he is preparing the ground for the day when someone decides that our families do not deserve to stay together. When he says that we abuse children, he is preparing the ground for the day when someone decides that our children should be taken from us.

This is what colonialists do. They project their own sins onto the people they wish to dominate, and then they claim that domination is a form of salvation.

The Most Moral Army

And then there is the matter of Gaza. I cannot write this without speaking of Gaza, because Gaza is where the colonialist’s mirror becomes a killing machine.

For months, the world has watched as the Israeli military has bombed Gaza, killing thousands of Palestinians, including thousands of children. Hospitals have been destroyed. Schools have been leveled. Families have been wiped from the civil registry, entire lineages erased.

And the leaders of this military - the men who drop the bombs, who operate the drones, who give the orders - call themselves “the most moral army in the world.”

Do you see the projection? Do you see the pattern? The same people who tell us that we do not value life, that we abuse our children, that we are backward and barbaric - these same people drop bombs on children and call it morality.

The same people who accuse us of being terrorists drop white phosphorus on schools and call it self-defense.

The same people who slander our faith, who lie about our Prophet, who caricature our women as oppressed and our men as violent - these same people steal land, demolish homes, imprison children, and call it security.

They look at us and see the monsters they have become. They accuse us of the crimes they commit. They project their own darkness onto us, so that when they look at the blood on their hands, they can pretend it is ours.

We Will Not Forget

Let me close this with a message to Donald Trump, and to everyone who repeats his lies.

You are a coward. You are a man who has built his life on lies, who has surrounded himself with predators, who has used the power of your office to attack the most vulnerable among us because you know we are the easiest targets. You speak of strength, but you prey on the weak. You speak of America, but you have made America smaller, meaner, more afraid. You speak of God, but you have never known God.

You say that Muslims do not belong in America. But America was built by immigrants, by refugees, by people who came to this land seeking freedom from exactly the kind of hate you spew. My family came to America seeking safety, seeking opportunity, seeking the chance to raise our children in peace. We have contributed to this country. We have served in its military, paid its taxes, built its businesses, taught its children. We are as American as you are - more American, perhaps, because we understand that America is not a race or a religion. America is an idea. And that idea is bigger than your hate.

You say that we marry our brothers, that we abuse our children. But the files that your Justice Department released tell a different story about you and your friends. The FBI notes, the victim testimonies, the emails from Epstein’s accounts - these are the record of your life. These are the company you kept. These are the lies you told about yourself.

We see you, Donald Trump. We see you for what you are.

And we will not forget.

My daughters will grow up knowing the truth about you. They will know that you lied about their faith. They will know that you mocked their mother’s hijab. They will know that you called their people backward and barbaric while you surrounded yourself with the most backward and barbaric men in America.

They will know, and they will teach their children, and their children will teach their children. And a hundred years from now, when your name is a footnote in history, when your rallies are forgotten, when your lies have been buried with you, my faith will still be here. The Quran will still be read. The call to prayer will still echo across the world. And the truth - the truth that you tried so hard to bury - will still be shining.

A Father’s Prayer

I am going to end this where I began: with my daughters.

They are asleep now. In the morning, I will make them breakfast. I will help them with their homework. I will kiss their foreheads before they leave for school. And I will pray.

I will pray that Allah protects them from the hate that swirls in the world. I will pray that they grow up strong and wise and compassionate. I will pray that they never forget the faith that has sustained our family for generations. I will pray that they know, in the deepest parts of their hearts, that they are loved - by me, by their mother, by their Creator.

And I will pray for you, Donald Trump.

I will pray that Allah guides you to the truth. I will pray that you find, before it is too late, the humility to see the harm you have caused. I will pray that you turn away from the lies and the hate and the darkness, and that you find, in whatever remains of your life, the courage to be something other than what you have been.

But I will also pray for justice. Because justice is the foundation of the heavens and the earth. And those who have lied about the innocent, who have slandered the faithful, who have used their power to hurt the vulnerable - they will answer for what they have done.

There will be an accounting. There is always an accounting.

And when that day comes, I will stand before my Lord with my daughters beside me. I will answer for my sins, as every human being must. But I will not answer for the lies you told about me. I will not answer for the hate you spread in my name. I will not answer for the children you did not protect, the women you did not honor, the faith you did not understand.

Those sins are yours. You will carry them alone.