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

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”.

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