Donald Trump win would drive me back to Britain, says Salman Rushdie

In his memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, the author recalls the attack that almost killed him. A return to power for the former US president scares him more.

Sir Salman Rushdie has said the return of Donald Trump to the White House could drive him back to Britain.

Sir Salman Rushdie has said the return of Donald Trump to the White House could drive him back to Britain as his long-awaited memoir outlines the impact of the attempt on his life in New York nearly two years ago.

The writer, 76, who became an American citizen after moving to the United States in 2000, said that although choosing between a post-Brexit Britain and a second Trump presidency would be like choosing the lesser of two evils, “one evil [Britain] has my family in it”.

Rushdie lost his right eye in the 27-second attack at the Chautauqua Institution in New York state, when he was also stabbed in the hand, chest, face and throat. The attack, for which Hadi Matar, a 26-year-old American, is due to stand trial, took place more than 30 years after Ayatollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, issued a fatwa against Rushdie for supposedly insulting Islam in his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.

British author Salman Rushdie with his Order of the Companions of Honour medal in 2023. Picture: AFP

Rushdie writes in Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, that he saw his attacker “running toward me down the right-hand side of the seating area. Black clothes, black facemask. He was coming in hard and low, a squat missile. I got to my feet and watched him come. I was transfixed.”

He says that after the attack he came to the realisation that he was probably dying: “It didn’t feel dramatic or particularly awful. It just felt probable. Yes, that was very likely what was happening. It felt matter of fact. My body was dying and it was taking me with it. 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 admits he was lucky to survive, paying tribute to members of the public who tackled Matar and provided first aid. He writes: “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.”

Former US president Donald Trump on the first day of his hush money trial in New York on Tuesday (AEST). Picture: AFP

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Rushdie said that although the attack had left him on the “edge of death”, it was not what would make him leave the US. He said a second Trump presidency would be “much worse” than his first term, with Trump “unleashed”. Rushdie said that his children, Zafar and Milan, wanted him to move back to Britain.

In the memoir Rushdie pays tribute to his wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, 46, who he met at a gala in New York in 2017. After finally leaving hospital and returning to his home in Manhattan, he writes: “Eliza lay down on the bed next to me and then, suddenly, she was sobbing uncontrollably as all the stress poured out of her. ‘My husband’s home,’ she sobbed. ‘My husband’s home.’ ”

Rushdie recounts how Milan, 25, flew from London to be by his bedside and told him that he had been researching knife attacks. “’Dad, there are so many cases where somebody gets stabbed just once and dies. And you got stabbed, like, 15 times and you’re still alive.’

Dad nods in acknowledgment. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘the fictional character with whom I now most strongly identify is Wolverine [the near-indestructible Marvel superhero].’”