‘Trump will be much worse a second time’
Author considers return to live close to his family in London if former president is re-elected
SIR SALMAN RUSHDIE says he will consider moving back to Britain if Donald Trump wins the US election, as it would make America “unlivable”.
In an interview with The Telegraph,
the Booker Prize-winning author says he has loved living in New York for the past 24 years but is tempted to move back to London, where his grown-up children live.
The knife attack in New York state that left him on the “edge of death” two years ago did not dissuade him from staying in the US, but he says America under Trump would be “much worse” than during his previous presidency because he would be “unleashed”.
The novelist has also revealed that he had a premonition of the stabbing in August 2022 and considered cancelling the fateful public appearance where it would happen. He describes a night terror in which someone was stabbing at him as he lay on the ground, which left him “shaken”.
He eventually decided he was being irrational, but two days later an alleged Islamist fanatic knifed him more than a dozen times on a stage where he was about to deliver a lecture.
Sir Salman says his overwhelming feeling as a “lake of blood” spread out around him was not pain but loneliness, as he contemplated dying without his loved ones by his side. He believes he survived thanks to those who came to his aid and because he “simply had no plan to die” that day.
The near-lethal attack came 33 years after a bounty was put on his head by the supreme ruler of Iran, who accused him of insulting Islam in his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.
Sir Salman, 76, lost his right eye in the attack by Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old American of Lebanese descent who had expressed support for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard on social media.
In his powerful and brutally frank account of the stabbing and his painful recovery, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, which is published tomorrow, he says he saw his black-clad attacker approaching, but rather than trying to flee he stood up and presented himself as a target “like a pinata” before an attack that lasted 27 seconds.
He pays tribute to the members of the public who tackled Matar and provided first aid, but says luck also played its part in his survival, because “if it had been bad weather the helicopter [that took him to hospital] wouldn’t have been able to fly and I would be dead”.
During the early part of his recovery, Sir Salman wanted to meet his attacker and ask him to “look me in my (one remaining) eye and tell me the truth”, but his wife, Eliza, was strongly against the idea and he has now changed his mind, though he is prepared to face him in court if he is required to give evidence at Matar’s trial later this year. Matar has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault.
Sir Salman, who says he knows of at least six other assassination attempts that have been foiled by police, had been living in New York without bodyguards, but now has to be far more wary and is given 24-hour police protection whenever he visits the UK.
He became a US citizen after moving there in 2000 but is ready to return to
THE FULL INTERVIEW Go to telegraph.co.uk now to read Mick Brown’s interview with Sir Salman Rushdie, which will be published in print in Saturday’s Telegraph Magazine
London if there is a second Trump presidency. He says his family, including his grown-up children, want him to return to Britain so they can see more of him, but he prefers New York as a place to live.
As a committed Remainer who believes Brexit has damaged Britain, Sir Salman says the choice of America under Trump or post-brexit Britain would be like choosing the lesser of two evils, “but one evil has my family in it”.
Two days before the planned lecture at the Chautauqua Institution near Buffalo, he had a dream that he was in a gladiatorial arena being attacked by someone with a spear as he rolled on the ground. The dream was so vivid that he was thrashing around in bed and had to be woken by his wife.
He was so unnerved that he told his wife “I don’t want to go”, but later decided it was just “a bad dream” and also needed the fee for the lecture to pay for the air conditioning in his apartment to be replaced.
In an extract from the book, which Sir Salman reads in an exclusive video recording available at telegraph.co.uk, he recounts lying on the stage watching “a pool of blood spreading outward from my body” and thinking: “That’s a lot of blood.”
He came to the realisation that he was dying and writes that: “It didn’t feel dramatic, or particularly awful. It just felt probable. Yes, that was very likely what
‘It felt matter-offact. My body was dying and it was taking me with it’
was happening. It felt matter-of-fact. My body was dying and it was taking me with it.” His inner self “was certainly on the edge of death along with the body that contained it”, he says.
“As I lay on the floor, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. What occupied my thoughts, and it was hard to bear, was the idea that I would die far away from the people I loved, in the company of strangers.
“What I felt most strongly was a profound sense of loneliness.” He thought he would never see his wife again, or his sons, his sister and his nieces.
As he lay half conscious he mumbled to the people trying to save him that his keys were in one pocket and his credit cards in another, and that: “A part of me – some battling part deep within – simply had no plan to die, and fully intended to use those keys and cards again,” and that an inner voice was whispering: “Live. Live.”
He says that when his attacker was arrested, he told police he had left his backpack in the auditorium. When the police asked if there was a bomb in it, he said “no there are more knives in it”. Sir Salman says: “What was he planning to do? Pass them out?... there are things about this that have that quality of being funny and not funny at the same time.”
The blade went into his eye as far as the optic nerve, leaving him permanently blind in that eye, and his worst fear is that he will also go blind in his other eye, which is being treated for macular degeneration.
He suffered severe nerve damage to his left hand and initially lost the use of it, but years of physiotherapy have restored the use of his fingers, though two of them have no feeling. The attack also severed the nerves in his lower right lip, which means his mouth slopes to the left when he speaks.
His feelings towards his attacker, whose name he refuses to speak, are “more contempt than anything else”, he says. “I just think, ‘you’re an idiot’.” ♦knife