President Donald Trump will host a dinner in the coming week in honour of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, restoring a White House tradition that he had abandoned during his first year in office, a West Wing official said Saturday.
The dinner is expected to be held Wednesday. The guest list was not made available.
Trump has a long history of making inflammatory statements about Muslims. During his campaign, he told an interviewer, “I think Islam hates us.”
He repeatedly insinuated over the years that former President Barack Obama might be a Muslim, and in 2015 he said he would seriously consider closing mosques. Late that year, he issued his call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and as president he issued a series of travel bans that mostly targeted Muslim nations.
The dinner, which was reported earlier by Politico, will revive a tradition that Republican and Democratic presidents have carried out for years during Ramadan, when Muslims fast during the daylight hours. A meal called an iftar breaks the fast.
Eid al-Fitr, the festival that signifies the end of Ramadan, is expected to begin Thursday evening.
