An explosion on the streets of Manhattan, pipe bombs in New Jersey, and a shootout with a terrorist suspect: a jittery election, filled with hyperbole, just grew more breathless. Of course most of that hype has emerged from the mouth of Donald Trump, and he embraced the emergence of a new terror campaign well before officials confirmed the explosion as a bomb.
Whether this helps or hurts the Republican nominee’s candidacy depends a lot on whether you are already primed for the politics of fear. If Trump and Clinton sound like they’re talking to two different audiences, that’s because the polls suggest they really are. The US is deeply divided not just about how to respond to terrorism, but about how serious that the terrorist threat is. Recent surveys have underscored the wide gap in perceptions between Republicans on one side, and Democrats and independents on the other.
According to a recent study by the Pew Research Centre, 58 per cent of Republicans think that terrorists are more capable of attacking the United States than they were on September 11. That is 24 points higher than independents and 27 points higher than Democrats. Over the last three years, independents and Democrats have barely changed their views on the prospect of terrorist attacks on the homeland. In contrast, Republicans have become sharply more concerned, up 18 points in the same period.
The big question about this increase is not whether it’s justified; it plainly isn’t. None of the terrorist attacks across the world since September 11 have come close to the mass murders perpetrated on that day. What has changed, however, is the Republican rhetoric about American weakness under US President Barack Obama. In this regard, Trump is no different from the other dozen candidates he beat in the GOP primaries. “Under the leadership of Obama and Clinton, Americans have experienced more attacks at home than victories abroad,” Trump posted on Twitter on Monday. “Time to change the playbook!”
How you react to this depends on what you consider attacks at home or victories abroad. As Trump himself has pointed out, the September 11 attacks were on President George W. Bush’s watch: an observation that outraged the GOP foreign policy establishment. As for a victory abroad, Trump’s definition of success includes trade wars, travel bans, mass deportations and giant border construction. Trump’s real skill is the politics of excess. Where other officials consider the policy implications of their words, Trump lives and dies through the power to shock — not the power to scare. Fifteen years after September 11, and a decade into our mass experiment with social media, we may be numbed to fear. On the streets of Manhattan on Monday, there were no signs of New Yorkers changing their daily habits as they did for months after the Twin Towers fell. But the power to shock lingers precisely because it is so hard to break through the digital noise of social media. Trump’s willingness to say things that are excessive, unjustified and outrageous enables him to. He lacks the self-restraint of an elected official who may be held responsible for performance.
Bigger argument
Like the current occupant of the Oval Office, for instance. Speaking to reporters in New York, Obama urged the media to be responsible. “It does not help if false reports or incomplete information is out there,” he noted pointedly. “So try to, as much as possible, stick to what our investigators say, because they actually know what they’re talking about.” As an attack on the press, this is mild by Trump’s standards. Then again, Trump has no desire to calm public fears in any situation.
Obama’s press advice teed up a bigger argument: that stoking fear was precisely what terrorists were trying to accomplish. “Even as we have to be vigilant and aggressive, both in preventing senseless acts of violence but also making sure that we find those who carry out such acts and bring them to justice, we all have a role to play as citizens in making sure that we don’t succumb to that fear,” he explained. “By showing those who want to do us harm that they will never beat us, by showing the entire world that as Americans we do not, and never will, give in to fear, that’s going to be the most important ingredient in us defeating those who would carry out terrorist acts against us.” It’s safe to say this is not a worldview shared by Trump, who tweeted out loud about how many hidden terrorists might be lurking in our midst. “Once again someone we were told is OK turns out to be a terrorist who wants to destroy our country & its people — how did he get thru system?” Trump wrote.
He was referring to Ahmad Khan Rahami, the suspect detained on Monday, who was a naturalised US citizen. Unexpected events normally provide the most revealing moments in a presidential campaign. And there are few things more unexpected than an actual terrorist attack, no matter the number of casualties or the number of foiled bombs.
So far voters have favoured Hillary Clinton’s response to terrorism over Trump’s. According to a recent poll for the New York Times and CBS News, 49 per cent of voters think Hillary would do a better job on terrorism and national security, a 4-point lead over Trump. By a 22-point margin, Hillary is favoured over Trump to handle foreign policy. Whether that lead can be sustained in the aftermath of a real-life bomb remains to be seen. Hillary indulged in her own hyperbole on Monday by focusing on Trump’s reaction to the weekend bombs.
She called Trump a “recruiting sergeant for the terrorists” by supporting the terrorists’ notion of a war with Islam, rather than a war with militants. “The kinds of rhetoric and language Trump has used is giving aid and comfort to our adversaries,” she told reporters. This presidential campaign has now entered the final, fevered stages of the cycle. Less than a week out from the first debate, questions of temperament and terrorism are likely to dominate the next several days, if not weeks. Like everything else in this contest, cooler heads are unlikely to prevail. Even when they favour better policy.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist, as well as chief digital and marketing officer at Global Citizen. He is the author of Renegade: The Making of a President, Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House and The Message: The Re-Selling of President Obama.
