A Muslim woman who was hired to work on the National Security Council under former President Barack Obama decided to stay on in her role for the incoming Trump administration to hopefully give them a more enlightened view of her religion — but she quickly found out that it was a lost cause.

Writing in the Atlantic, former NSC adviser Rumana Ahmed explains that she lasted only eight days under the Trump administration in a role that she had held since 2011.

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“When Trump issued a ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries and all Syrian refugees, I knew I could no longer stay and work for an administration that saw me and people like me not as fellow citizens, but as a threat,” she writes.

She went to notify Trump’s senior NSC communications advisor, Michael Anton, of her decision to quit, and she explained that she couldn’t in good conscience work for an administration that would issue such a ban.

He responded by staring at her silently.

Reflecting on her very brief time in the Trump White House, Ahmed says that what she witnessed was “strange, appalling and disturbing.”

“As one staffer serving since the Reagan administration said, ‘This place has been turned upside down. It’s chaos. I’ve never witnessed anything like it,'” she writes. “This was not typical Republican leadership, or even that of a businessman. It was a chaotic attempt at authoritarianism — legally questionable executive orders, accusations of the press being ‘fake,’ peddling countless lies as ‘alternative facts,’ and assertions by White House surrogates that the president’s national security authority would ‘not be questioned.'”

The whole essay can be found at this link.