Donald "Hussein" Trump

The first campaign I covered in earnest was Barack Obama’s in 2008. And what a baptism by fire it was.

Obama was a little known junior senator from Illinois, and I was a young conservative coming up in print and broadcast media.

Most presidential campaigns have their brushes with the dark and ugly at some point – a country this big and diverse isn’t always going to behave itself.

But this one was on a level we hadn’t seen before.

Obama, as a candidate for the highest office in the land, deserved plenty of scrutiny – he was relatively inexperienced and unproven, and had only been a senator for two years when he announced his candidacy.

But the scrutiny turned ugly – predictably so, I suppose – pretty quickly.

At rightwing outlets like Fox News, Human Events, Newsmax and elsewhere, talks of Obama’s “radical” policies, socialist activism, and “ties” to Marxists – all fair game, just as are Trump’s policy ideas, his past political beliefs, and his associations – started taking a decidedly racist, bigoted and ugly turn.

Rumors started swirling that Obama was secretly a Muslim, despite a total lack of evidence and despite being an open and practicing Christian for nearly two decades.

Andy Martin, a rightwing writer and frequent failed political candidate, is credited with being one of the first to make the assertion in a chain e-mail message. Newsmax ran at least two stories, “Was Obama a Muslim?” and “Obama ‘Lying’ About Muslim Past, Expert Says.” WND.com ran a piece on a “Muslim” photo, while Human Events published a piece called, “Our First Muslim President?”

Leaning on post-9/11 anxieties, rightwing talkers like Michael Savage repeated the rumor that Obama had attended a radical Muslim school. Rush Limbaugh argued that Obama wasn’t even African-American, but Arab. Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter, Mike Gallagher, Bill Cunningham all joined in the ugly attempts to otherize a man who would go on to become our first Black president.

But another device would soon emerge – calling Obama by his full name. We were just a year or so past the execution of Saddam Hussein, the “Butcher of Baghdad,” and it was all too easy to refer to the newcomer candidate as “Barack Hussein Obama” for some on the right who were happy to court any racists and xenophobes who happened to be there.

I thought it was gross then (and said as much), and it obviously still is. I was always proud of Sen. John McCain for refusing to dog whistle like some in his party. Several times he corrected his own supporters who’d used the “Hussein” moniker or falsely called Obama an Arab.

That campaign, ugly as it was, helped pave the way for Donald Trump to come along just a few years later and use Fox News to spread his own bigoted attacks on Obama, while courting viewers he would later turn into voters..

In 2011, Trump launched a media campaign calling Obama’s birth certificate into question, while also stoking fears that he was secretly Muslim.

“He doesn’t have a birth certificate,” he said on Fox. “He may have one, but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim. I don’t know, maybe he doesn’t want that.”

Trump gleefully jumped on the “Hussein” train early and often. He took any opportunity he could get to use it, and still does. As recently as August 2024, Trump said at a North Carolina campaign stop, “Did you see Barack Hussein Obama last night taking little shots?”

As late as October of last year, he made a point to go back and add “Hussein” to Obama’s name when answering a question about tariffs from Bloomberg.

“China thinks we’re a stupid country, a very stupid country,” he said. “They can’t believe that somebody finally got wise to them. Not one president, Bush, Obama – Barack Hussein Obama – have you heard of him?”

Trump and Republicans’ attempts to otherize Obama by implying he might be Arab or Muslim weren’t enough to stop him from becoming President, but they absolutely conditioned an environment in which rightwing dog whistles were eventually abandoned for open racism and bigotry, the kind Trump voters either ignored or enjoyed.

This history makes Trump’s Middle East adventures this week all the more ironic and appalling.

His long and documented history of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate includes pushing baseless conspiracy theories about post-9/11 “celebrations” among Arab-Americans, invoking a Muslim travel ban, calls to surveil American mosques, and suggesting Syrian refugees could be ISIS, among others.

Happy to use Muslims and Arabs as Brown bogeymen to get elected, Trump is now galavanting all over the Middle East with little in the way of foreign policy to discuss, in an apparent effort to enjoy the spoils of being President again.

In stops that include Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE – Arab and majority Muslim countries – he’s been feted by foreign leaders and literal princes, with Arabian horses, real estate tours, red Cybertrucks, Ritz-Carlton stays, and even a mobile McDonald’s restaurant.

The biggest perk from his Middle Eastern friends so far, though, has been a $400 million plane, a gift of Qatar that’s been dubbed the “palace in the sky.”

As I’m sure you’ve seen and read, the clear breach of the Emoluments Clause isn’t going over well back home, where even Trump fans are tsk-tsking the blatant act of bribery.

Trump fan Mark Levin blasted the gift and the coziness of Trump’s relationship with Qatar and the Saudis, as has Ben Shapiro, Erick Erickson, Laura Loomer and others.

(You can watch what I have to say aut THAT here.)

But for all of Trump’s anti-Arab rhetoric, it seems here’s where he’s most in his element, surrounded by the gaudy trappings of royal and ill-begotten wealth, and where he’s able to potentially cash in on his position.

The Trump Organization has multiple lucrative business interests in the Arab world, including a $5.5 billion golf resort, a forthcoming Trump tower, a partnership with LIV golf, and Trump’s new crypto company.

“The president couldn’t stop smiling, and understandably so,” wrote the New York Times. “The Saudi royals are his friends and allies. They are his family’s business partners. More than most, they understand his tastes and desires.”

But remember, it was Barack Obama’s supposed ties to unsavory radicals, Muslims, and Arabs, and his worrisome “palling around with terrorists we were meant to fret all those years ago. It was Barack “Hussein” Obama we were meant to distrust.

So gross. So dishonest. So corrupt. So predictable.