How would Trump handle a terror attack?
On a sunny day, on a crowded urban street, a heavy van leaps suddenly onto the sideway. It accelerates. It kills and injures dozens. Or an improvised bomb explodes on public transport, injuring many. A perpetrator, apprehended quickly due to CCTV footage, professes allegiance to Isis but claims to have acted alone.
A version of this awful scene was replayed in Barcelona and just days ago in London – but what if it were to happen in the US? How would its government respond?
One way of making a prediction is by looking at the Trump administration’s responses to other dramatic threats.
Consider its responses to Syria, North Korea, and Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. All share three common traits: they have been calibrated with an eye for drama, with no attention to ensuring enduring change and with scant regard for harmful collateral damage.
If this form is maintained, a response to domestic terrorism is likely to do more harm than good.
Syrian policy is exemplary. In April, Trump abruptly reversed a hands-off policy by launching Tomahawk missiles in response to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapon. Yet today, by the president’s own admission, the US has “little to do” with Syria. His dramatic April strike has had little effect beyond its literal impact.
When North Korea accelerated its missile tests, the Trump administration responded with fiery bluster that has singularly failed to elicit a greater alignment of Chinese and Russian behavior. To the contrary, its threats of a trade war seem to be fraying US relations with South Korea – ironically, creating political space for North Korea to maneuver between enemies.
After Hurricane Harvey, Trump seized the Texas town of Annaville as a stage to brag about his own historical manifest destiny, and, predictably, the crowds he draws. Not a peep from the administration, though, came of the catastrophic failure of urban planning that led to tragedy in Houston, how federal flood insurance elicited dangerous over-construction, or (heaven forbid) the possible role of climate change.
Despite a patina of toughness, the predicable beats of Trump’s crisis responses make the US a more, not less, vulnerable terrorism target.
An attack on US interests will likely provoke familiar high-octane rhetoric. Terrorists, however, thrive when their enemies treat them as mightier than they are. Eying the prospect of a propaganda coup, they likely take a US attack to have higher returns than normal.
And because the administration evaluates its responses using an ideological rather than an empirical lens, those reactions are unlikely to target accurately the sources of violent risk. The ongoing dissolution of Isis’s territorial control robs the administration of the most grandiose targets. Suspects closer to home are more likely to feel the brunt of its
dramatic, even theatrical reactions.
The rollout of the first travel ban in late January provides some taste of what this might look like. That measure was installed without warning. It initially applied not only to immigrants but also legal residents of the United States.
As I saw as a legal observer at O’Hare Airport, this operated in effect as a subtle kind of ethnic cleansing by excluding certain nonresidents. While the travel ban has since been narrowed to apply only to visa holders, its initial application shows how the right of movement can quickly be extinguished, trapping or excluding minority populations.
If responses are selected for their dramatic flair, we can securely expect a reenactment of the 9/11 aftermath, perhaps inflected by a borrowing of extreme measures invented in other nations. The FBI’s ‘PENTTBOM’ entailed aggressive use of immigration law to detain hundreds of suspects, often based on ethnicity or perceived faith. Arab and Muslim communities were swept with ‘voluntary’ interviews that at times resulted in arrests on insubstantial premises.
But large-scale arrests, while terrifying to the communities involved, may well not be as dramatic as the administration wishes. Expect, therefore, for the White House to take a leaf from the French emergency-powers book by closing dozens of mosques and deporting imams. Talk of registers for Muslims will inevitably seethe into the president’s daily ration of Fox News talking heads.
Finally, the Trump administration has pointedly failed to continue Obama’s efforts to close the Guantanamo prison, and has yet to follow Obama’s example of eschewing the use of military detention in the US.
Rather, it seems quite likely that longstanding American traditions of criminal trials before independent judges will be sacrificed for another quick political hit.
And yet, will any of this do much good for security? Like the administration’s responses to Syria, North Korea, and Hurricane Harvey, all this is unlikely to impinge on Isis’s ability to recruit via social media. To the contrary, it will likely stoke the private animus and hatred that in the European context has made migrant communities more fertile recruiting grounds.
The US will be one step closer to a vicious circle in which its government elicits violent responses upon which that government thrives politics. It will be one step closer to abandoning the best of its democratic and constitutional heritage.
Aziz Huq is Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. He is co-author of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror