A Year After Bataclan: How Will President Trump Handle A Terrorist Attack?
While Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim bigotry had been hinted at before the attacks, the deaths of 130 people on Paris streets at the hand of seven ISIS-inspired terrorists pushed our new President-elect into a new brand of xenophobia and neofascism. It’s possibly a horrifying preview of how President Trump will respond to such tragedies during his term in office.
Following the attack, which occurred a year ago today, he said the US government would have “absolutely no choice” but to close down mosques. He refused to rule out implementing a national Muslim registry or conducting warrantless searches of Muslims in the US, stating “We’re going to have to do things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.” Finally, a month after the attack, he gave one of the most defining policy prescriptions of his campaign: a (temporary) ban on all Muslim entry into the US:
“Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life. If I win the election for President, we are going to Make America Great Again.”
When a similar attack occurred last March at a Brussels airport, Trump again broke precedent on rhetoric against Muslims:
“We have to be smart in the United States. We’re taking in people without real documentation. We don’t know where they are coming from, we don’t know where they’re from, who they are… they could be ISIS, they could be ISIS related…If they could expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding. You have to get the information from these people.”
More recently, Trump and his closest advisers appeared to be walking back the proposed ban on Muslim entry — suggesting it might just be entry of people from “the terror states” — but nevertheless an official website listing Trump policies just happened to be refreshed this week with the Muslim ban still intact.
While it’s a grave breach of constitutional, legal, and political norms to even hint at such ideas, Trump has made them a core part of his appeal. And while one might not suspect Trump of turning around on January 21st to open a Muslim database, one wonders — How will Donald Trump respond to terrorist attacks in the United States?
Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have been applauded for the calm and reconciliatory tone of their response to terrorist attacks. Consider Bush’s words in the wake of 9/11:
“I also want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world. We respect your faith. It’s practiced freely by many millions of Americans and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself. The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends. It is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them.”
Or consider Barack Obama’s frequent status as “mourner-in-chief,” embracing the nation after a depressingly-large collection of mass shootings and disasters committed by all nature of radicalized, well-armed men. Through the blind acts of mad men — as in Aurora or Newtown — or the evil massacres committed in Orlando and Charleston, Barack Obama has been an iconic expression of national grief and frustration:
Although they did not embrace it as fully as Donald Trump, however, both Presidents Bush and Obama echoed Trump’s irrational fear and skepticism in their policies. Consider the USA PATRIOT Act, rushed through Congress in the immediate days following 9/11 and widely used to surveil against Muslims and many other Americans. or the CIA torture program, designed and implemented under Bush and justified entirely through the invoking of terrorism. Obama, too, enjoyed a full disdain for the Constitution in the growth of the NSA’s mass surveillance program
“My assessment and my team’s assessment is that they help us prevent terrorist attacks,” Obama said after Edward Snowden made the extent of the programs clear. “You can’t have 100 percent security and also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.”
Putting aside the horrifying notion that those same expansive privileges are now in the hands of the most spiteful and petty man to ever secure the office of the Presidency, what’s clear is even Presidents not so visibly tempted by paranoia of outsiders can find themselves employing policies they might otherwise have found unjustifiable.
Trump is certainly not masking his racism and seems to be energized by terrorist attacks —”Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism” were his first public words following the deadliest mass shooting in American history. As much as Bush and Obama had, what will a President Trump justify in the wake of a crisis?
Historically, our constitutional rights and good sense whither under the weight of our own fear. Ideally, we should be able to look to our leaders to, at the very least, soothe the mourners personally impacted by an attack and help us all past the collective trauma. Bush did this well after 9/11, as did Obama after numerous tragedies.
But can we count on President Trump to ease our flighty minds when the next angry young man — pushed to the edge online and surrounded by easy access to high-powered weaponry — commits an atrocity in public life?
Trump clearly sees the presidency as an opportunity, but he fails to understand it as a responsibility. Not just as a public servant, but as a communicator. Atrocities will happen while he is in office — it is a simple fact. The gravity of that truth seems beyond Trump’s capacity to rationally understand and respond to risks, and when even the best men are lured to sacrifice liberty for security, one certainly feels unease at the prospect of President Trump doing so.
