The Islamophobic rhetoric of Trump's administration didn't come out from nowhere. The number of organized anti-Muslim hate groups in America nearly tripled last year, from 34 to more than 100, according to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-leaning non-profit that tracks extremist groups.

 The center credited the “incendiary rhetoric” of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign with fueling the rise in anti-Muslim hate, along with anger over terror attacks like the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando last June, as reported in The Guardian. 

The authors of the report highlight that several senior officials in the White House, including Steve Bannon, Steven Miller, and Kellyanne Conway, are “serious anti-Muslim ideologues”. Michael Flynn, former security adviser, who resigned Monday, tweeted that “fear of Muslims is rational”.

The new report found there are now more than 900 active hate groups across the US – from Ku Klux Klan chapters to neo-Nazi hubs to racist black separatist organizations.

In another article, The Guardian explores how Trump’s delusions about Islam are a threat to the fragile situation in the Middle East. 

Sixteen years after September 11, the war on Islam that Bush declined to launch has been effectively taken up by the new inhabitant of the White House. “Anyone who cannot name our enemy,” Donald Trump stated during the campaign, referring to Obama and Hillary Clinton alike, “is not fit to lead this country.” He immediately did so: “radical Islam.”

On 27 January, Trump set the tone of his presidency by ordering a temporary travel ban to citizens from seven Muslim-majority nations into the United States, and denying entry to all refugees – though he has said he wants to prioritise persecuted Syrian Christians in the future.

Trump's populist view of the world and Islam is "crashist". It does not acknowledge the existence of liberal Muslims or any variations of faith and practice among a community of nearly 2 billion people. Any accommodation or even negotiation seems out of the question in the context of what Bannon has described as a “global war against Islamic fascism”.

The radical Islamists and the Trumpists subscribe to complementary visions of history that sharpen the conflict between them. And this is an obstacle to any kind of political progress. As reported in The Guardian.