But the recent WH leak to WaPo. regarding 45*’s idle thought about needing a terrorist attack, suggests another attempt to affect free elections in the US, yet it already has many precedents since the Inaugural.
- 45*’s reluctance to challenge Russia by enforcing sanctions or abrogating leadership in diplomacy for reasons to be made clearer as #TrumpRussia continues into 2019.
- His failure to compel investigation of voter fraud only shifts to the GOP’s other voter suppression efforts, which are not new and have been more than constant since the Nixon administration.
- Then there’s the heightening of tensions for imaginary reasons: migrant terrorism versus domestic terrorism in a time of: reduced illegal immigration, reduced police officer deaths, reduced homicide rates.
- More likely will be some more ambiguous, yet spectacular international event where threat actors could remain forever unknown but clearly involving US flag interests.
Trump, though, is thinking about a different, possibly crazy, comparison:
I’m pretty skeptical that the political dynamics of September 2001 would be replicated today. But regardless, this is a frightening line of thought for an incumbent president and his team to be entertaining.
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One would hope, by a similar token, that fear of undermining the effectiveness of important counterterrorism operations would restrain even the most shameless administration from, say, pursuing a partisan purge of the FBI and the rest of the intelligence community.
But if the president and his top staff are not so concerned with democracy but rather with purely political power, that’s a terrifying proposition. And given Trump’s willingness to put his own interests before democratic norms — from keeping his business interests to firing his FBI director to protect a friend — the absurd idea feels almost plausible.
If Trump thinks a terrorist attack would serve his political interests — either through a blind rally-’round-the-flag effect or by specifically validating anti-immigrant demagoguery or what have you — how hard is he really working to keep the country safe?
www.vox.com/...
The alarmist way to engage in this preparatory discussion is to scream “Reichstag fire” into the echo chamber and hope people understand that you are not accusing the administration of plotting an attack or planning death camps in the wake of an attack.
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What kind of post-attack planning are we talking about? Based in part on Trump’s newest statements accusing the press of actively suppressing news of terrorist attacks, the Post's Philip Rucker suggested last night that Trump is “laying the groundwork to preemptively shift blame for any future terrorist attack on U.S. soil from his administration to the federal judiciary, as well as to the media.”
1. Will the Trump administration respond appropriately to a small- or large-scale terrorist attack on U.S. soil?
But even putting aside informed inferences based on the administration’s policy moves, we have plenty of evidence that directly attests to not just the Trump team’s willingness to exploit acts of terror to achieve its purposes, but more specifically, its fixation on viewing terror first and foremost in these terms.
2. Does the likelihood that Trump will exploit a future attack provide a helpful frame of reference for understanding the Trump team’s pre-attack course of conduct?
This is a fair assessment of what Trump is already doing, though it is unclear whether that conduct is simply a reflection of his personality or the product of careful thought. If the Reichstag fire is on the extreme, democracy-crushing end of the attack-exploitation spectrum, Trump’s statements are sufficiently purposive and abnormal to put us somewhere at the other end of that spectrum. The point is that there is value in anticipating, based on Trump’s pre-attack finger-pointing, the forms his post-attack scapegoating may take. This anticipation is necessary if the press and the public are to prepare for and preempt his eventual efforts to translate this scapegoating into concrete policy goals.
3. Can we do anything to mitigate the problem of Trump’s likely exploitation of a future attack?
Yes. In fact, there is little point worrying about whether the Trump administration has (in the limited sense) Reichstag-fire designs at all unless the object is to inculcate in the public sufficient awareness of what is happening so as to stave off the administration’s ability to capitalize on terror. Now is the time to start drawing lines—that is, before disaster puts a vice grip on our emotions: how do we think the administration will respond to a small-scale or large-scale attack, and what are the White House reactions and policies we deem unacceptable?
www.lawfareblog.com/...