Trump’s right: Terrorists are losers
“Loser” is a strange word. Literally and most plainly, it is simply someone who doesn’t win some specific contest or challenge: the loser of a race, boxing match, business deal, etc. Economists routinely talk about how this or that policy — on trade, taxes, whatever — creates “winners and losers.”
... I bring this up because in his statement on the Manchester terror attack, President Trump said terrorists are “evil losers.”
“I won’t call them ‘monsters’ because they’d like that term,” Trump said. “I will call them, from now on, ‘losers,’ because that’s what they are. They’re losers. And we’ll have more of them, but they’re losers.”
The response from many Trump critics has been a mixture of outrage and eye rolling. Part of the problem is that “loser” is one of Trump’s favorite insults. As USA Today cataloged, he’s used it against everyone from Rosie O’Donnell to George Will and Standard & Poor’s. Not only has he called me a loser, but a “total loser.” But I don’t think he was calling me a terrorist.
Moreover, I don’t think he’s wrong to call terrorists “losers.” In the West, a lot of the people attracted to Islamic extremism are losers in all the meanings of the word. Omar Mateen, the avowed disciple of the Islamic State who killed 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando, was a screw-up and school bully who dreamed of becoming a police officer but ended up a very disgruntled security guard instead. The alleged Manchester bomber, Salman Abedi, a college dropout, appears to have been a misfit.
Islamic terrorist organizations are hardly the only groups to recruit from the ranks of loserdom. Street gangs, neo-Nazis and countless communist fronts have been seducing resentful oddballs, outcasts and misanthropes. It simply makes sense that such people would be attracted to such groups. Radical causes provide a sense of meaning, belonging and importance to people who lack such things in their daily lives. Throughout Europe, the reserve army of jihadists is full of people who feel alienated or deracinated in Western society. In other words, they feel “lost,” which is a kind of losing. The extremists tell the disgruntled that their resentments are righteous and give these losers the opportunity to settle scores.
On the other hand, in some non-Western societies, terrorists aren’t losers in the pejorative, schoolyard-epithet sense, but they are losers nonetheless. Osama bin Laden was the scion of a wealthy and prominent family. Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s successor as the head of al-Qaida, was from a successful Egyptian family of doctors and was himself a surgeon. They chose to become terrorists for ideological reasons. Subscribing to a doctrine first explicated by Sayyid Qutb, an Islamist intellectual, they believed that the true faith was losing the battle with the forces of modernity and the West.
President Trump may not have all these distinctions in mind when he calls terrorists “losers,” but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review. E-mail goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, Twitter @JonahNRO. Copyright, Tribune Media Services Inc.