The party’s standard-bearer has borrowed heavily both in message and in membership from far-right conservative activists whose pronouncements on Islam have long been denounced as dangerous zealotry by mainstream conservative and liberal policymakers alike.
Former president George W. Bush and GOP candidates Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Mitt Romney all repudiated anti-Islam rhetoric as un-American.
Trump has become the first and only major-party presidential candidate to adopt these ideas as his own. With his calls for a complete ban on Muslim immigrants or “extreme vetting” on people entering the country, policy prescriptives once relegated to the fringe have become mainstream.
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