Progressive Muslim Immigrant Explains Why She Voted For Trump [Video]

Following up a Washington Post Op-Ed, self-described progressive liberal Asra Nomani further explained on CNN why she was voted for Republican (and former Democrat and independent) Donald Trump on Election Day in an interview that for whatever reason was abruptly cut off.

In a shock to the accepted media narrative, first-time candidate Trump won the presidency on Tuesday against Democrat rival Hillary Clinton and will take office as the nation’s 45th commander in chief on January 20, 2017.

In the Post article about being a “silent” Trump voter, Nomani, 51, a Muslim immigrant who came to the U.S. from India at age four and a self-proclaimed lifelong liberal Democrat, indicated that she voted for Trump for economic reasons as well for national security event though she doesn’t necessarily go along with the President-elect’s rhetoric.

“I support the Democratic Party’s position on abortion, same-sex marriage and climate change. But I am a single mother who can’t afford health insurance under Obamacare. The president’s mortgage-loan modification program, ‘HOPE NOW,’ didn’t help me. Tuesday, I drove into Virginia from my hometown of Morgantown, W.Va., where I see rural America and ordinary Americans, like me, still struggling to make ends meet, after eight years of the Obama administration. Finally, as a liberal Muslim who has experienced, first-hand, Islamic extremism in this world, I have been opposed to the decision by President Obama and the Democratic Party to tap dance around the ‘Islam’ in Islamic State…”

As far as civil liberties concerns after Donald Trump is inaugurated president, she added that, “I have absolutely no fears about being a Muslim in a ‘Trump America.’ The checks and balances in America and our rich history of social justice and civil rights will never allow the fear-mongering that has been attached to candidate Trump’s rhetoric to come to fruition.”

In her essay, she also rejected the simplistic caricature that Trump supporters are racist, bigoted, or rednecks.

Nomani acknowledged that she disagrees with Trump on several public policy issues but that she rejects “the political hyperbole — agenda-driven identity politics of its own — that demonized Trump and his supporters.”

Commenting on the blowback that she received from anti-Trump Twitter users (a cohort often referred to generally as social justice warriors), former Wall Street Journal reporter Nomani told CNN’s Carol Costello that “we have a liberal honor brigade nowadays that is basically shutting up and silencing people who disagree with them…even now the idea of speaking out as somebody who’s voted for Trump is earning me all sorts of lovely labels like idiot, f-er…that I think violate liberal values of free speech and self-determination…”

@AraNomani tells me why she's a Muslim immigrant who voted for Trump. @AsraNomani https://t.co/L9PzPMeMyN

— Carol Costello (@CarolC) November 11, 2016

When Costello claimed that Muslims-Americans fear Trump, Nomani offered a different take.

“I don’t fear Donald Trump, and I don’t fear the policies he’s talking about. What I fear is the extremist interpretation of Islam that is spilling blood on the streets of our world…[Trump] is confronting the issue of ideology. He is not choosing a path that we’ve had for the past eight years of political correctness…”

In an exchange with Anderson Cooper, Nomani, who co-founded the Muslim Reform Movement, reaffirmed to the CNN anchor that she voted for change because her life has not improved under eight years of the Obama administration.

.@AsraNomani on why she voted for Trump: I hope we will deal honestly, without obfuscation, with Islamic extremism https://t.co/acfoUf12Pc

— CNN (@CNN) November 12, 2016

Separately, Hillary Clinton supporter and documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, who predicted a win for the New York real estate mogul based on the premise that he would roll through the economically depressed rust-belt states, insisted on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that Trump voters aren’t racist.

“They twice voted for a man whose middle name is Hussein. That’s the America you live in.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaMy75fxOyg

[Featured Image by Julie Jacobson/AP Images]