I woke up last Monday in India to a tweet by Dr David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. ‘Greatest. Year. Ever. #MuslimBan.’ Underneath was an image of my green card cancelled out with a large red cross. The text read: ‘Homeland confirms Trump Immigration Ban Will include Green-Card Holders.’

The image was from a piece I had written for an American newspaper the year before. It was for a Fourth of July special, and it was about feeling at home in America. “My life,” I wrote, “had been a strange combination of deep roots and homelessness, and America seemed like the obvious answer.”

It was a country that seemed big-hearted, generous, trusting. But even then there was a bad wind blowing off the mainland. I did not think it would bring in Trump, but thought it wise to add: “This may be an odd thing to say, with Donald Trump darkening the horizon, but perhaps it is in times like these that we need most to be reminded of who we are – or, at least, who we are capable of being.”

Duke, an early supporter, was the kind of man the Trump election had emboldened. And he was prepared to say what Trump, as president, now had to be coy about: it was in fact a Muslim ban.

RogelioGarcia Lawyer (@LawyerRogelio) DAVID DUKE loves Trump Muslim Ban. pic.twitter.com/jqfbqiWTF5

Everyone knew it, and it did not seem to matter that I was a British citizen. “We are all thinking of you,” a friend in New York wrote to me, just as I was getting ready to come back to America, “and of the trouble you may have getting back into the country, despite your British birth and passport.”

There were reports pouring in of naked racial profiling at America’s airports. I had always been a target of secondary screening, but now the gloves were off, and even full-fledged American citizens, in various shades of brown and black, were being put into separate lines from their fairer-skinned compatriots.

An email I received from an Iranian-American captured the mood perfectly: “It’s difficult to think that all these swift changes at JFK are solely the result of Trump’s recent order … With Trump’s triumph to the highest position in the country, a pre-existing xenophobia and Islamophobia that runs old and deep in this country has been finally unleashed and come to the surface. The worst, I’m afraid, is ahead of us.”

Perhaps. But this is also an exhilarating time to be American.

It is exhilarating to watch a great open society defend freedoms that it has taken for granted in the past. What I love most about America is the very thing Trump seeks to undermine.

I love how capacious and elastic the idea of being American is. It cannot be reduced to a linguistic, ethnic or religious identity. America was written into existence, and it meant that the written word was paramount; the law was all; one could be free here of the demands of historical identity.



Trump, ill-advisedly resorting to nativism in a land of immigrants, had warred against the legal reality of what it meant to be American in favor of something crude and racial.

Donald Trump's executive order means he is now officially gunning for Muslims | Moustafa Bayoumi Read more

Right from his attack last summer on a judge of Mexican extraction to now the inclusion of green card holders in his ban, Trump had wanted to rob America of its universality. He failed to see that this was the source of the greatness he was so eager to restore.

It was only fitting then that this man, with his anemic imagination, who acted as if he was a principle unto himself, should be cut down to size in a court of law by that very constitution whose scale and beauty he had failed to grasp.

I flew back Friday. The ticker on Emirates told me that a Seattle judge had hollowed out Trump’s immigration order. The ban was in tatters, and the peoples of seven despised nations were boarding planes to America. Not a deluge, but a slow purposeful trickle that was nonetheless driving the new president into rage.

It would be folly to believe Trump’s power was broken – a court of appeals will hear a challenge to Trump’s ban on Tuesday – but there had been a definite reversal. Desperation was creeping in, and the Rumpelstiltskin we all know to reside in Trump was fighting his way out.

The administration had retreated from its position on green card holders. But I was in touch with a lawyer just in case there was trouble. There wasn’t. I sailed right back into my adoptive country and texted him a message of thanks.

“My pleasure,” he wrote back a moment later, using an emoji of a flexed arm, “F**k Trump.”