Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  Trump’s incoherence was less important than what it revealed: a disgust at waging the war on its familiar terms, along with an enthusiasm for voicing its civilizational subtext. The same weakness that made the War on Terror a no-win situation had also yielded the current wave of Central American migration. Trump promised to crash the wave against a giant wall on the southern border for which he would make Mexico pay. The socialist writer and critic Daniel Denvir observed that Trump’s pledge to extort Mexico’s wealth for the wall was effectively a demand for imperial tribute. The analysis applies equally to his claim on Iraq’s oil.

  Trump would tolerate no more nonsense about a “war of ideas.” Brutality would be defeated by greater brutality. The euphemism of the War on Terror had been an attempt to conceal such disreputable behavior, but Trump brought it unapologetically into the open. He lied that “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in Jersey City had cheered the fall of the Twin Towers. As vengeance, Trump would “bomb the shit out of ISIS” and stop fighting “a politically correct war,” by which he meant one that distinguished between guerrillas and civilians. “You have to take out their families,” he told Fox. Torture “absolutely” works, Trump asserted, showing faith in the CIA’s fifteen-year-old narrative. He pledged to bring back “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” and stock Guantanamo Bay full of “bad dudes.” ISIS’s assault on Paris meant there was “no choice” but to close mosques within the United States. Before 2015 had ended, Trump delivered his ultimate response to ISIS: calling for a ban on all Muslim immigration. “We can’t take a chance,” he said, denying that ISIS fighters were meaningfully distinct from the Muslim civilians they raped, terrorized, and turned into refugees. It was Cheney’s one-percent doctrine applied civilizationally. Stephen Miller was so excited by these promises that the following month he joined Trump’s campaign. His old boss, Jeff Sessions, the first senator to endorse Trump, helmed the candidate’s foreign policy and national security working group.

  Trump’s instinct for violence extended from his rallies, where he offered to post bail for anyone arrested for beating up protesters, to Moscow, where he praised Vladimir Putin as a strong leader. The path blazed by the white supremacist Steve King was still too far for most Cold War–forged Republicans. Trump ambled down it. “[Putin’s] running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” he said in December 2015. Even Bill O’Reilly was discomfited, and when he asked Trump about Putin’s assassinating his enemies, Trump responded, “What, do you think our country’s so innocent?” After all, he continued, Russia fights “Islamic terrorism all over the world, that’s a good thing.” Where others, liberal and conservative alike, flinched at or denied the brutality that built America, Trump was proud of it. It made America great.

  There were legions who had been waiting for such a champion. At a March 2016 Trump rally at the Kentucky International Convention Center, a twenty-five-year-old man in Trump’s signature Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat physically pushed out protester Kashiya Nwanguma, whom he called “leftist scum.” The man, Matthew Heimbach, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor but was proud of his actions, which he justified by claiming that Nwanguma was a member of Black Lives Matter. “White Americans,” he wrote, “are getting fed up and they’re learning that they must either push back or be pushed down.” Heimbach was a neo-Nazi, leader of the fascist Traditionalist Worker Party. A more bourgeois but no less fascist Trump supporter was Richard Spencer, who through the “alt-right” united white nationalists and internet-addicted provocateurs. The alt-right was a bridge between Trump support and open fascism, possessed of just enough deniability. “This is a movement of consciousness and identity for European people in the twenty-first century,” Spencer explained to NPR. The Southern Poverty Law Center later concluded that through Trump, “the radical right suddenly felt a connection to mainstream politics and a realistic hope of gaining political power, which drew more adherents—and a wider variety of adherents—to the movement.”

  Fifteen years of brutality as background noise made it easy for many to misinterpret Trump’s position on the War on Terror. Journalists listened to his invective against it and called him antiwar, as if he had not been promising to “bomb the shit” out of millions of people. “Donald the Dove,” Maureen Dowd of The New York Times wrote, “in most cases . . . would rather do the art of the deal than shock and awe.” Such attitudes revealed what elites chose to believe about Trump and what they opted to consider merely an act for the rubes. What they overlooked by focusing on Trump’s criticisms of the ground wars was that he wanted to expand the War on Terror to frontiers it had yet to reach. Most important, they heard Trump describe the enemy as Radical Islamic Terror. For fifteen years, nativists, stoked by Fox News, had considered such a definition a prerequisite for winning the war. Elites had never understood why the right was so spun up about the phrase. Trump knew that “Radical Islamic Terror” extracted the precious nativist metal from the husk of the Forever War.

  None of this was tolerable to the Security State and its allies. Sean MacFarland, a Petraeus-favored officer during the Iraq occupation who now commanded the war against ISIS, rejected indiscriminate bombing as “what the Russians have been accused of doing in parts of northwest Syria.” Dozens of Republican-aligned security luminaries signed open letters refusing to serve in a Trump administration, birthing the Never Trump Beltway movement. But the architects, contractors, and validators of the War on Terror were placed in awkward positions. One of the letters decried Trump’s “expansive” embrace of torture, since their own embrace of “enhanced interrogation” foreclosed on a more categorical rejection. Mike Hayden, who had lied so extensively about torture that the Senate compiled his falsehoods into a separate annex of the torture report, who secretly constructed a surveillance dragnet around the United States while imploring Congress to set the balance between liberty and security, characterized Trump as “unwilling or unable to separate truth from falsehood.” Nor was there any self-reflection from signatories like Iraq occupation chief Bob Blackwill, who took over as Bush’s personal envoy after Bremer, and who had asserted against “the professional pessimists within parts of the U.S. intelligence community” that “2005 will be a good year in Iraq for President Bush.” None of them seemed to understand that they had created the context for Trump. He was about to show them.

  Trump relished his critics’ revulsion. He presented it to his crowds as validation: the people who had gotten America into an unwinnable war hated him. Why listen to them? After a suicide bombing in Afghanistan, Trump lamented, “When will our leaders get tough and smart?” He thanked the Never Trump signatories for stepping forward, “so everyone in the country knows who deserves the blame for making the world such a dangerous place.” There was no credentialism capable of stopping Trump, not even from the military. His uniformed detractors weren’t truly reflective of the military, as they had been “reduced to rubble” by Obama. He insisted he had a secret plan to defeat ISIS that the generals would either love or, in disliking it, reveal their incompetence. It was a dominance politics rarely played against the military. To make it work, Trump, a Vietnam draft dodger, had to show he was unintimidated by attacking even the most venerated. McCain, who could not abide Trump, was no genuine war hero because, as Trump boasted, “I like people who weren’t captured.”

  Because the Security State couldn’t win the War on Terror it was waging, Trump had a permanent cudgel against it. Why accept the expertise of the architects of a quagmire? He championed the explanation that these so-called intelligence experts, political generals, amoral attorneys, and other liberals had misunderstood that this was a war of survival against Radical Islamic Terror. All of them had condescended to the nativist right since 9/11, and they had marched America into humiliation. Wrapped in a redemptive flag, the nativists were not afraid to challenge the authority of the military. The Cheneyites hadn’t been, either, though neither side tended
to see the continuity.

  Trump and his nativist followers, the coalition known as MAGA, did not quite offer a Dolchstosslegende. They didn’t claim the Security State had deliberately lost the War on Terror, but rather that it had flinched at confronting a civilizational assault. The offer Trump made to the Security State was an alibi. He would “unleash” the military, which meant, as John Rambo had said, that the military had not been allowed to win. It was easier for the MAGA crowd to accept that than to accept that their American exceptionalism had marched America into ruin.

  The sense of civilizational besiegement that the Forever War inspired was central to MAGA. With Breitbart providing a voice, and social media providing networking and amplification, the alt-right was able to rebrand white nationalism and even outright neo-Nazism. Its members spoke in terms of civilizational “replacement,” by which they meant the loss of a racial caste hierarchy with whites at the top, a status conferring though never guaranteeing substantial material benefits. (Demagogues and bosses had long divided the working class by blaming any unfulfilled white expectation of material comfort on nonwhites.) Fluent in online sarcasm and provocation, members of the alt-right half joked that they were “meme war veterans,” by which they meant propagandists out to radicalize conservatives, and not merely the “101st Fighting Keyboardists” whom progressives had mocked as chickenhawks when they typed their vituperative defenses of the Iraq war. In the style of fascists everywhere, the alt-right reveled in its transgressions and its apocalyptic fantasies of crushing its opponents. Such transgressions extended into classical anti-Semitism, previously taboo among conservatives, such as using “(((globalists)))” as a term for Jews to evade internet-platform censorship. Nonwhites had a place in the movement, provided they espoused the superiority of “Western civilization.”

  The alt-right understood what could fuel their appeal to so-called “normies.” In July 2016 the troll site 4Chan began a petition to call Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization “due to its actions in Ferguson, Baltimore, and even at a Bernie Sanders rally.” It garnered over 120,000 signatures in a week. BLM cofounder Patrisse Khan-Cullors wrote, “The accusation of being a terrorist is devastating, and I allow myself space to cry quietly as I lie in bed on a Sunday morning listening to a red-face, hysterical Rudolph Giuliani spit lies about us.”

  For his entire career, manipulating reality had redounded to Trump’s benefit. Two generations earlier he had aggressively courted New York reporters to ensure frequent publicity. He planted anonymous quotes, sometimes using the fake name John Barron. When he told his crowds that the lying news media used anonymity to cover for what he called fake sources, he spoke from experience. He pledged to Alex Jones, who had matriculated from calling 9/11 an inside job to becoming an all-purpose right-wing conspiracy broadcaster, “I will never let you down.” He surrounded himself with criminals like his fixer, Michael Cohen, who would threaten reporters when necessary. Trump specialized in areas that often function as cash laundries: real estate, casinos, licensing. He covered repeated business failures with debt while portraying himself in entertainment and news media as the embodiment of capitalist brilliance and sexual potency. His campaign rallies played “Real American,” the theme music of professional wrestler Hulk Hogan.

  His defining features—gilded apartments, ridiculous hair, media thirst, transparent lies—occasioned contempt from the sophisticated. As did Trump’s unsubtle bigotry; they preferred theirs structural instead of flagrant. Trump, like a good con man, harnessed that contempt. It drew him closer to his constituency, who hated all the people who laughed at Trump. After all, the ones laughing loudest were the liberals from the upper middle class, who preferred Hillary Clinton.

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  IT WAS FINALLY HER TIME. There would be no Iraq war vote to derail her. She had endured endless Republican questioning over Benghazi—much of it from Mike Pompeo—with her hand contemptuously holding her chin, returning theater in kind. When she was secretary of state, she was the most popular public figure in America. Her marathon Benghazi session, lasting an entire workday across two committees, left her with an astronomical 67 percent approval rating. She left the Obama administration as Obama’s designated successor.

  The fact that Hillary Clinton was to Obama’s right gave much of the Security State a reassurance it appreciated. There was not a single policy decision in Obama’s first term where Clinton had deviated from the Security State’s preferences. She displayed none of what they considered Obama’s indecision, and they trusted her judgment better than his. Clinton had favored deeper involvement to oust Assad. While Obama was in their view too solicitous of Moscow, Clinton infuriated Putin in December 2011 by calling for an Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe investigation into Russian election fraud. It was a moment of vulnerability for Putin—his party had triumphed in the parliamentary vote, but by a lower than typical margin—and Clinton chose to press the U.S. advantage. Among much of the Security State—but hardly all, as this was still a right-leaning conglomerate by default—she was considered not only strong but supremely competent. Petraeus in particular respected her.

  Clinton’s challenge within the Democratic Party came from the political faction the Security State took least seriously. The only politician drawing rallies of Trump’s size was Bernie Sanders. Sanders rejected most of Clinton’s agenda as irrelevant or harmful to the wave of economic precarity soaking most Americans. His defense of working-class interests alternately inspired, scandalized, and divided the Democratic Party. Bernie made it clear that he did not share Clinton’s bellicosity, but he did not make rejecting it part of his revolution. It is surely an issue on which Bernie’s supporters were more strident than he was. In November 2015, Sanders presented his vision of democratic socialism in the most ambitiously left-wing speech a presidential candidate had given in generations. Tacked at the end of it he discussed the “global threat of terror.” With his emphasis on multilateral solutions, Sanders suddenly sounded like John Kerry in 2004. He complained that Saudi Arabia wasn’t paying its fair share for fighting ISIS. His challenge to Clinton was as potent as it was urgent, but not because of his opposition to the War on Terror.

  Clinton did not seem to mind being pitted against Sanders. It was indisputable that she was ready to lead a global hegemon, having already shaped and conducted its foreign and domestic policy. For this presidential run, she swung to the right of her 2008 geopolitics. After Russian warplanes entered Syrian airspace, Clinton proposed that the air force establish a no-fly zone over a U.S.-policed safe area for refugees from Assad and ISIS. This would entrench the United States in the Syrian civil war, risk escalatory dogfights with Russian warplanes, and spare America and Europe from accepting Muslim refugees. Despite Benghazi, Clinton did not acknowledge that Libya, the war of choice she had championed, was a disaster. She now proposed the most aggressive American intervention in the Mideast since the Iraq invasion. Clinton simultaneously lambasted Trump’s Islamophobia while practicing its condescending liberal variant, causing American Muslims to wince as she referred to them as the “front lines” of the War on Terror and implored them to be “part of our homeland security.” Her brain trust felt she had found her moment. “There’s no doubt that Hillary Clinton’s more muscular brand of American foreign policy is better matched to 2016 than it was to 2008,” key aide Jake Sullivan told The New York Times.

  She was also the most demonized individual in American public life. At bottom, the Benghazi accusations were an attempt to demonstrate that “Killary” could not be trusted to fight Radical Islamic Terror—even while Trump, losing the plot, decried her for pursuing ever more hopeless Mideast wars. Alongside the attacks against her was a vicious lie. Clinton’s longtime aide Huma Abedin, claimed Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and much of Fox News, was tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. It was pure nativism, and John McCain denounced it on the Senate floor.

  But decades
of demonization from the right, by now a habit, succeeded in keeping a cloud of suspicion over Clinton. In that political context, it emerged that Clinton maintained a private email server over which she conducted public business.

  Use of the server meant Clinton was hoarding public records, though her aides denied any such intent, and Clinton herself had no better explanation than its being a matter of convenience. The State Department had a policy explicitly prohibiting use of personal communications for department business. As was inevitable, she had deleted thousands of emails from the server, something that became the subject of an FBI investigation. With the Benghazi circus fruitless, the right lunged for Clinton’s emails as another magic weapon to vanquish her. At Trump rallies she was “Crooked Hillary”; the crowds chanted “Lock her up!” Conservatives made the server a national security issue: Who knew what foreign power had exploited her communications? Trump, at a press conference, lost the plot again. “Russia, if you’re listening,” he said in late July, “I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing.” Within hours, email accounts controlled by Russian intelligence sent messages containing malicious links to fifteen accounts associated with Clinton’s private office.