Comedian and actor Aziz Ansari on Friday accused Donald Trump of creating a dangerous environment for American Muslims with his “vitriolic and hate-filled” campaign rhetoric.
“It’s visceral, and scary, and it affects how people live, work and pray,” Ansari wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “It makes me afraid for my family.”
The “Master of None” star joins a vocal chorus of celebrities and entertainers to go public with their concerns about a Trump presidency. Fellow comics Louis C.K. and John Oliver have been relentless critics of the presumptive Republican nominee, skewering him online and on television.
Ansari, the son of Muslim immigrants, wrote that the current political climate creates “a strange feeling that you must almost prove yourself worthy of feeling sad and scared like everyone else” after a terrorist attack like the one in Orlando.
Trump’s remarks that Muslim Americans should do more to police their own communities, Anzari wrote, implied “that millions of innocent people are somehow complicit in awful attacks. Not only is this wrongheaded; but it also does nothing to address the real problems posed by terrorist attacks.”
In a June 13 speech in New Hampshire, his first after the Orlando nightclub massacre, Trump largely pinned the responsibility for the December San Bernardino terror attack on the killers’ Muslim neighbors.
“They didn’t turn them in,” Trump said, “and we had death and destruction.”
In his op-ed, Ansari dismissed those suggestions, cheekily arguing that, by Trump’s logic, “after the huge financial crisis of 2007-08, the best way to protect the American economy would have been to ban white males.”
