You may have noticed that members of the MAGA movement often seem to find any excuse available to deflect attention from the dangerous incompetency of Trump administration officials they like.
One could argue that such tactics explain why people like JD Vance, Pete Hegseth and Mike Waltz, who were all members of an unsecured chat in which classified military information was inadvertently divulged to a journalist, survived the Signal scandal, despite how they may have put American service members at risk.
But there’s one clear difference between those leaders and another Trump official that has many in MAGA world up in arms over similar security concerns: He’s Indian American.
On Tuesday, Politico reported that Madhu Gottumukkala, the acting head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, had uploaded sensitive files last summer to a public version of ChatGPT. The report, which hasn’t been confirmed by MS NOW, comes after the Department of Homeland Security launched a probe into CISA employees who administered what the Trump administration has called an “unsanctioned” polygraph test to Gottumukkala — one he reportedly failed.
After the report, many of the responses from pro-Trump social media accounts — including prominent MAGA influencers — were basically just racist attacks focused on Gottumukkala’s Indian heritage.
This is just a sample, and there’s much more of this in the other reposts. So continues a trend that I and some of my MS NOW colleagues have written about previously: MAGA influencers attacking prominent Indian Americans who support Trump for unmistakably racist reasons. FBI Director Kash Patel has faced such fury. Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has, too. And now we can add Madhu Gottumukkala to this list as well.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
