Yay we're ridiculing a completely nativist, homegrown form of American fundamentalism by comparing it to the incomprehensible Islamic East again.

The point isn't that there's no basis of comparison; it's that the Islamic World exists mostly as a negative referent in the Western imagination. We can only comprehend the scale and scope of US fundamentalism in relation to societies we already understand as barbaric.

Whereas the fundamentalism is normative in Muslim-majority societies, it is aberrant to the United States. Comparing the MAGA crowd to ISIS, al-Qaeda, and so forth wouldn't be funny otherwise. Because haha they're not like us; they're grotesque and foreign.