Trump postures
NEW Yorkers on Wednesday were mourning the eight dead from a terrorist attack in Lower Manhattan and wondering how vulnerable their families might be, even as they picked themselves up, as New Yorkers do, and went on with life.
Some inevitably thought back to another beautiful day, September 11, 2001. After that day, they remembered, they and their nation were led in mourning, and towards unity, by a president who shared their sorrow and understood his own role.
The current American president reacted rather differently. “A Chuck Schumer beauty,” Mr Trump tweeted on Wednesday, blaming an immigrant visa programme, signed into law by President George HW Bush and supported by Senator Schumer, for the fact that the terrorism suspect, an immigrant from Uzbekistan, was a legal resident.
Mr Trump might instead have rallied the nation. But he could not resist resorting to his campaign fantasy that closing the nation’s borders to those whom he selectively targets is the all-purpose solution to terrorist violence. The president said he would “certainly consider” sending the suspect, Sayfullo Saipov, to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. That would be foolishly counterproductive, considering the criminal case that authorities are already building in New York. This time, Mr Trump issued a condolence tweet for victims and families, but on Wednesday cited the attack as prime evidence for his proposals to slash legal immigration in half in coming years and curtail Muslims’ ability to enter the country.
The president, in suggesting that he might consider sending the defendant to Guantánamo Bay, enthusiastically trashed the federal court system as a “joke” and a “laughing stock.”
In fact, what happens is prosecutors have won hundreds of convictions of terrorism defendants in the courts since September 11 – including Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers, who was sentenced to death. Meanwhile, 16 years after the Guantánamo Bay prison opened, not a single September 11 defendant held there has been brought to trial. When it comes to achieving justice, Guantánamo is the real laughing stock.