After Donald Trump’s inauguration, Rumana Ahmed, a female Muslim National Security Council staffer, made the difficult choice to stay on and advise the new administration. Just eight days later, she says, her status as a Muslim woman in Trump’s White House made for an unbearable workplace environment. Hearing news of a travel ban prohibiting citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries, the twenty-seven-year-old child of Bangladeshi-American parents quit her job on January 30, 2017.

In an article published on the website of the Atlantic on February 27, Ahmed chronicled her experience working under President Trump and the change in political climate that “threatened the nation’s security and its system of checks and balances.” Unlike the months following 9/11, a time characterized by the mass Islamophobia of ignorant citizens, the hatred was being spread by people in positions of authority.

Of course, Ahmed’s claims in her Atlantic article did not go unchallenged by the right. In an article entitled Fake News, Exposed posted on the Weekly Standard, Trump supporters accuse Rumana Ahmed of “burrowing,” leaving her political appointment to become a secretary, a job for which she was overqualified, in order to move into a lifetime government role. A blog post on Front Page Mag entitled ‘Good Riddance’ accuses her of being a mole and a spy and suggests that her departure from the NSC is a sign that Trump’s promise to make America great again is working.