Rethinking our reaction to Hoda Muthana

Here’s a complicated question: What do we do about Hoda Muthana?

Muthana, the daughter of Yemeni immigrants, was born in Hackensack, N.J., in 1994 and grew up in Alabama. After she graduated from high school, her father gave her a cellphone, which opened up to her the beguiling world of Islamic extremism.

In 2014, Muthana withdrew from the University of Alabama, cashed her parents’ tuition check and flew from Birmingham to Istanbul. She was smuggled into Syria and joined ISIS.

Over several years, she married in succession three ISIS fighters. In 2015, via Twitter she praised the Charlie Hebdo murderers in Paris. She encouraged other Americans to join ISIS or commit acts of violence at home.

But gradually Muthana became disillusioned with ISIS and the caliphate. Now, apparently remorseful, she wants to come home.

It’s hard to muster much sympathy for Muthana. Your first response may be similar to mine: Sorry, but you’ve got to live with the consequences of your bad choices.

And, indeed, this is the way President Donald Trump sees it. He entertains no doubts. His response was immediate and unequivocal: Muthana will not be permitted to return to the United States. In short, Trump relied on his most immediate impulse, which was to condemn.

In fact, a telling characteristic of the Trump administration is its preference for evaluating complicated problems with feelings rather than with data, the advice of experts or inconvenient, complicating facts.

Trump is well known for his aversion to reading and intelligence briefings. He takes considerable pride in his reliance on instinct over information. For example, last fall as he complained about Federal Reserve policy, Trump said, “They’re making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

This assertion is probably accurate. Trump’s gut will always get more attention from him than will anything from “somebody else’s brain.” But the real question is whether Trump’s gut is correct. And his casual self-confidence should generate a little wariness, even among his supporters.

But it’s not hard to see why Trump is inclined to rely on his gut. Most modern problems are extremely complicated. Often more information merely increases the level of complexity. Relying on impulse and feelings provides a quick and easy route from problem to solution. Solutions that reflect a deeper understanding of difficult problems require so much intellectual energy that the readily available instinctual solution is enormously attractive.

We could illustrate this characteristic of the administration in several ways, but the southern border wall is a good one. Trump’s version is simple: Bad things are coming across the border: illegal labor, drugs, criminals and terrorists. Therefore, build a big, beautiful wall.

Climate change? It’s much easier to dismiss it as a hoax than to investigate the problem deeply and arrive at solutions.

Black football players calling attention to a rash of police shootings by choosing to take a knee during the national anthem? “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired!”

Back to Hoda Muthana. Clearly, there’s nothing surprising about Trump’s reaction to what she did; it’s perhaps consistent with the reaction of many in his base, as well as many other Americans.

But here’s the problem: Muthana appears to be an American citizen, which means that she has rights to due process just the same as the rest of us; we deny her those rights at our peril.

Clearly, she was disloyal, but she started down the ISIS rat hole when she was barely out of high school, long before she was prepared to make mature decisions. Mercy, anyone?

Finally, she has a 2-year-old son. He may be the offspring of a misguided marriage to an ISIS fighter, but he’s also two other things: an American citizen, as well, and entirely innocent of his mother’s mistakes.

So Trump’s instincts should be restrained in favor of the rule of law; this is the kind of careful, anti-instinctual thinking that helps distinguish us from groups such as ISIS.