Five Ways Donald Trump Is Wrong About Islam

Donald Trump took up so bandwidth during the 2016 election cycle that we all paid insufficient attention to the people lurking within his campaign operation who have now moved into key policymaking positions. Foremost among these worrisome characters is White House political strategist Stephen Bannon, the former Goldman Sachs employee, Hollywood producer, and Breitbart chairman who appears to be behind much of Trump’s chaotic approach to foreign policy. But you could add oddballs like self-promoting national security "experts" like Sebastian Gorka (who falsely claimed to have been an expert witness at the Boston Marathon bombing trial) and nutcase Islamophobe Frank Gaffney, whose extreme views are apparently taken seriously by short-lived National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. To give you a sense of just how out-there Gaffney is, his think tank, the Center for Security Policy, has been identified as an "extremist group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center and criticized by the Anti-Defamation League for promulgating "anti-Muslim conspiracy theories."