Donald Trump has made the demonization of Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, a key element of his 2020 re-election strategy. But the targeting of Ms. Omar and her fellow Democrat and Muslim member of Congress, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, started as soon as they became candidates.

We published a study this week that found that, around the 2018 midterm elections, Ms. Omar and Ms. Tlaib were in the cross hairs of a tiny band of Islamophobes, long before Mr. Trump elevated them in his tweetstorms, and likely before they were even on his radar.

Read more from Lawrence Pintak, Brian J. Bowe and Jonathan Albright at the New York Times.

It takes just a few minutes on the right social media string to recognise that inflammatory comments are raw meat for a sizeable and dangerous ethnocentric online community who consider Muslims sub-human. We've spent the past several months reviewing more than 120,000 Twitter posts and Facebook comments involving Muslim candidates for the 2018 midterm elections.

All the showers in the world won't make us feel clean again.

In our foray into the Facebook comments and Twitter posts tagging Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib - the two Muslim women elected to Congress - and other Muslim candidates for office last autumn, we found a cabal of Islamophobes for whom Muslims were, quite literally, demons.

Donald Trump has made the demonization of Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, a key element of his 2020 re-election strategy. But the targeting of Ms. Omar and her fellow Democrat and Muslim member of Congress, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, started as soon as they became candidates. A new poll of Muslims who ran for office in the 2018 midterms shows how central bigotry has become to America's political life.

We published a study this week that found that, around the 2018 midterm elections, Ms. Omar and Ms. Tlaib were in the cross hairs of a tiny band of Islamophobes, long before Mr. Trump elevated them in his tweetstorms, and likely before they were even on his radar.

Read more by Lawrence Pintak, Brian J. Bowe and Jonathan Albright at Foreign Policy.