Salman Rushdie says re-elected Donald Trump will drive me back to Britain

‘Brexit Britain is pretty awful too,’ he said

Salman Rushdie has said it “may be impossible” for him to stay in the US if Donald Trump is re-elected.

The Satanic Verses author, 76, faced his own mortality when he was attacked on stage ahead of a 2022 lecture on free speech at the Chautauqua Institution in New York.

After being stabbed multiple times in a frenzied 27-second attack, the author was hospitalised for six weeks, lost the sight in one eye and the partial use of a hand.

A vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton’s presedential campaign in 2016, Rushdie was asked whether he thinks Trump will be re-elected when America goes to the polls again in November.

“I’m going to make the same mistake again. I think he might lose,” he told The Telegraph.

Asked to consider the prospect of a Trump victory, he said: “Unbearable. Unthinkable. Because he’ll be much worse this time. He’ll be unleashed. He’s a liar and a bully, and cares about nothing except himself.”

Rushdie said America would be “unlivable – it’s seriously what I think”.

Rushdie wondered if the 2022 attack was his own fault (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

He added: “[My children] want me to come back to London. I’ve always been torn by having almost all my close family live in London, and to be living here.”

Pressed on whether he would return: “I might do. I’m not going to say more than that,” before adding that Brexit Britain was pretty bad too.

“Brexit. Because I think the damage done to England, not just economically but culturally, is so awful that’s mad too.”

Rushdie has penned a memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, in a bid to come to terms with the attack.

In the novel, the 76-year-old reveals he wondered whether the attack was his own fault for offending parts of the Islamic world with his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, which prompted a fatwa to be issued against him by the state of Iran.

“As so many people had said all along - was it my own fault?” he wrote of the then-removed assassination order.

The author may leave the US if Donald Trump is re-elected in November (Angela Weiss/UPI/Shutterstock)

“But as I grew stronger in body and mind, it was an analysis I rejected emphatically. To regret what your life has been is true folly.

“There were probably few exceptions to this principle, but very few of the people who ought to regret their lives - Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Adolf Eichmann, Harvey Weinstein - ever do so.”

The author then reflected on the world around him and admitted that the US “may become impossible to live in” if Trump is elected for a second term.

Rushdie recalled how this prompted his now 25-year-old son, Milan, to ask his father if he’d ever return to the UK.

“I saw, not for the first time, how much he wanted that, and that in the aftermath of the attack, and his very real fear of flying, he wanted it even more,” he wrote.

“I don’t know,” Rushdie recalled saying, “Brexit Britain is pretty awful too.”

“Before the attack Eliza and I had been talking about spending more time in London because, after all, almost all my close family members lived there.

“However, now was not the time to discuss that, I told him. I just need to get back on my feet.”

While the author is on his feet again, the criminal proceedings against his alleged attacker, Hadi Matar, then 24, are ongoing.

Matar’s attempted murder and assault trial was due to begin on 8 January, his lawyers managed to delay proceedings, arguing that Rushdie’s new book could be used as evidence.

“It will not change the ultimate outcome,” Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said of the postponement.

Matar, who has pled not guilty, admitted to disliking the author citing the fact that he allegedly “disliked Islam”.