There are many sinister things in the world. But a mother’s grief isn’t one of them. Yet Donald Trump sees dark undercurrents everywhere – including in the silent homage Ghazala Khan, the mother of the fallen soldier Humayun Khan, paid to her son.

“If you look at his wife, she was standing there,” he said, referring to her appearance at the Democratic national convention, in which she stood alongside her husband as he delivered a searing critique of Donald Trump. “She had nothing to say … Maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me.”

It shouldn’t be hard to recognize something as universal as grief. Our hearts all break in similar ways, no matter our creed or color. Ms Khan said: “When I was standing there, all of America felt my pain, without a single word. I don’t know how he missed that.” Well, he did because he was blinded by prejudice. Where everyone else saw a mother, Trump saw a Muslim – a faith group Trump wants to ban from entering the United States.

Scrutinizing the silence of a grieving mother is an unusual move for a would-be president

Had he not been so fixated on her difference – the salwaar kameez she wore, the dupatta scarf draped over her head – he might have interpreted her silence in a different way. Perhaps the loss of her son had robbed her of words. Or maybe she feared she might break down on the national stage if she uttered his name. But that’s not how Trump reasoned. Instead, he suggested that she, a Muslim woman, hadn’t been allowed to talk.

Ghazala Khan swiftly corrected him. “I cannot walk into a room with pictures of Humayun … Walking on to the convention stage, with a huge picture of my son behind me, I could hardly control myself. What mother could? Donald Trump has children whom he loves. Does he really need to wonder why I did not speak?”

Scrutinizing the silence of a grieving mother is an unusual move for a would-be president. So is the conspiratorial suggestion that she might have been silenced. But it fits Trump’s playbook. He deliberately paints minorities, especially Muslims, as being fundamentally different from other Americans. He questions everything about them. Even their grief.

It is politically convenient to do so in the case of the Khan family. Ghazala and her husband, Khizr Khan, have emerged as powerful critics of Donald Trump. In Khizr Khan’s speech, he said “Hillary Clinton was right when she called my son ‘the best of America’. If it was up to Donald Trump, he never would have been in America.”



After famously waving his copy of the US constitution, asking if Trump had ever read it, Khan reminded Trump that his son laid down his life for his country. “You have sacrificed nothing and no one.”

It makes sense for Trump to disarm these outspoken adversaries in the way he knows best: painting them as inherently foreign and un-American. But in the process, he risks turning into the “foreign” one himself. He has strayed far from societal norms, further than many feel comfortable with.



America, like much of the western world, is going through a tumultuous time. Political discourse is coarsening. Fears are heightened. People are on edge. But that which makes us human – such the ability to feel empathy – has not vanished. Ghazala Khan believes that too, asserting: “All of America felt my pain.”

If she is right, then Trump might just find himself alone in this bizarre battle against a broken-hearted mother and father.