Reign of Terror

by Spencer Ackerman

  Within months of Mattis taking office, the Pentagon froze an already-stalled program, begun under Bush, that expedited citizenship in exchange for enlistment and specialization in short-handed areas like foreign languages. Memos seen by NPR in July 2017 cited ten thousand enlistees who would be caught in the pipeline, unable to complete the program, leaving one thousand of them subject to deportation. Addressing the rising anxiety in the ranks, Mattis promised in February 2018 that undocumented service members would “not be subject to any kind of deportation,” a pledge he said came with Nielsen’s concurrence.

  But a month later ICE deported Miguel Perez Jr., who had come to the United States legally as an eight-year-old and enlisted in the army months before 9/11. His two tours in Afghanistan left him with PTSD and the substance abuse problem that led him to pass a laptop case full of cocaine to an undercover officer, which ICE used to justify the deportation. The following month ICE prepared to deport Xilong Zhu, an honorably discharged and undocumented soldier who enrolled in a university surreptitiously established by ICE as a visa-fraud trap. If Mattis had been sincere in his pledge, he did not vigorously enforce it, nor did it outlast his tenure. A Government Accountability Office study in 2019 found that ICE was deporting veterans at a rate that made it difficult to calculate just how many had been removed. Whatever Mattis’s promises against deportation, they did not extend to retention. Dozens of undocumented recruits in the expedited-citizenship program ended up purged from the military under Mattis. By the following year, after Mattis’s departure, the military began to deny enlistments for what The Washington Post called “existing as foreigners.”

  Shortly before the 2018 midterm elections, the administration manufactured a crisis along the southern border, where illegal crossings had hit a historic low. Trump and Fox News endlessly focused on a migrant caravan heading northward to the border. The men, women, and children within it were not described as what they were—people fleeing poverty and violence—but instead as an “invasion” force, against which military action would be justified. Trump also lied that there were “Middle Easterners” in the caravan. Mattis acquiesced to a fifty-eight-hundred-troop deployment to backstop CBP, and denied to reporters that it was at all a political stunt. In Texas, where he traveled with Nielsen to observe the nebulous mission—one that would continue into 2020—Mattis defended it as falling in the tradition of the 1916 Punitive Expedition against Pancho Villa.

  It was part of a pattern of compromise for both Mattis and McMaster. McMaster had debased himself by defending Trump’s sharing Israeli intelligence on ISIS with Russia as “wholly appropriate.” None of it was enough to save them. Trump, after taking McMaster’s advice on Afghanistan—and adopting McMaster’s security strategy, beloved by the defense commentariat, for “great power competition” against Russia and China—fired him and prompted the end of his army career.

  A critical disagreement between Trump and McMaster concerned Syria. After the fall of the ISIS Caliphate, McMaster advocated remaining indefinitely in northeastern Syria, a place where the United States had no legal mandate to wage war, but where state failure left no force to oust it. The Americans effectively guaranteed an autonomous statelet for the Syrian Kurds, who had done most of the fighting to oust ISIS. Less than a week after firing McMaster, and six months after the fall of Raqqa, Trump promised at a rally that he was getting out of Syria “like very soon.” But he had picked the wrong national security adviser for that. McMaster’s replacement, John Bolton, instead redefined the war to accommodate his hostility to Iran. By September 2018, not only were two thousand U.S. troops still in Syria, but Bolton promised to remain “as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders, and that includes Iranian proxies and militias.” The following spring Mike Pompeo hinted at expanding the War on Terror to Iran outright. In a manner reminiscent of 2002, Pompeo declared, “There is no doubt there is a connection between the Islamic Republic of Iran and al-Qaeda. Period. Full stop.”

  Neither Mattis nor the military was interested in redirecting the war away from ISIS, but Bolton’s advocacy of an open-ended presence suited their interests. Bolton, however, had entirely overreached. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, eager to assault the Kurds, and a strongman who Trump admired, goaded Trump toward the exits by threatening to invade northeast Syria. Erdogan turned out to be startled at how precipitously Trump was prepared to pull out. Shortly before Christmas 2018 the president issued a declaration that no president had made since Bush announced mission accomplished on the aircraft carrier: the assertion of victory that his base desperately wanted to hear. “We have won against ISIS,” he said in a video he tweeted, so the troops were “all coming back, and they’re coming back now.” The military was able to roll the order back, but not before both McGurk and Mattis resigned in disgust. Mattis had declared in his highly public resignation letter that he would stay until February, but Trump told him not to bother. The people lamenting Mattis’s departure the most were Security Staters like Jim Clapper, who lionized Mattis’s resignation as a “classic” document of patriotic integrity.

  Mattis left the same month as an exasperated Kelly. With them ended the era of the Adults—but not the illusion that they had waged an internal resistance. When Mattis reemerged in 2019, it was to promote a memoir that was hostile to Obama and Biden but silent on Trump. That silence affected Mattis’s reputation as a sage not a bit, just as it had remained unsullied after the trans ban, the border deployment, and the troop deportations. In May 2019 Mattis’s deputy and interim successor, the former Boeing executive Patrick Shanahan, approved a request from DHS to make military bases available for “temporary facilities to house and care for a minimum of 7,500 total single adult male and female aliens” in the custody of ICE. Mattis had slow-walked creating the camps after Trump had instructed him to do so in a June 2018 executive order. Pentagon officials would explain the delay by claiming that they had never received a formal request from DHS. But Mattis had not refused the order. He certainly did not offer his resignation over what Paul Yingling, who had been a senior officer on McMaster’s staff at Tal Afar, called “participation in hostage-taking.”

  By suborning three lions of the War on Terror, Trump prolonged the situation he so often lamented. Even after the U.S.’s near pullout, Trump’s envoy for Syria, apparently believing Trump had been contained by the Security State, told the Kurds not to bother seeking a separate peace with Assad, which might have forestalled a Turkish invasion. The U.S. military encouraged the Kurds to destroy their defensive fortifications. Kurdish commander Mazloum Abdi was led to believe that “Turkey would never attack us so long as the U.S. government was true to its word with us.” In October 2019, Trump ordered an abrupt abandonment of Syrian Kurdish positions to permit Erdogan his assault on the U.S.’s allies. Yet even as Rojava’s citizens pelted departing U.S. Humvees with rotten fruit, Trump would not fully withdraw. He boasted instead of plunder, redeploying to eastern Syria’s oil fields on the promise of taking the resources he had called America’s rightfully due spoils. It was as if enabling the slaughter of those who had bled to retake the Caliphate was fulfilling a campaign promise. Trump had no time for any outrage about staining the national honor. He blamed the Kurds for “releasing” ISIS prisoners from positions they abandoned to flee Erdogan’s forces. Two years after gloating that ISIS was a spent force, McGurk told an Abu Dhabi conference in the wake of the Turkish rampage, “I think we are likely to see a significant comeback by ISIS.”

  In the midst of the pullback, the end of the month brought a revealing moment: a redux of the bin Laden raid. Backstopped by the CIA, Delta Force commandos landed in late October in a village in western Syria called Barisha, far from the former Caliphate, where they killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Trump gloated that Baghdadi died “whimpering and crying and screaming,” pursued by Special Operations dogs. Yet like Obama in 2011, he did not use the raid as an opportunity to claim victory in the war. He
had already declared it, and had ordered a withdrawal predicated on it, but instead he spoke as if the mission would continue. America’s “reach is long” against “these savage monsters,” he said, who “will never escape justice.” Despite the Pentagon assurances that no harm came to civilians, thirty-year-old Syrian farmer Barakat Ahmad Barakat told reporters that he had lost an arm to U.S. helicopter fire that killed his two companions. Barakat would forever remember an episode that America forgot within days. Trump, committing the same mistake as his hated predecessor, provided Americans no reason to view Baghdadi as anything more than the latest dead terrorist.

  He devoted far more emphasis, two weeks later, to granting clemency to three service members who were facing consequences for Forever War atrocities. Army lieutenant Clint Lorance had been serving a sentence at Leavenworth for ordering his soldiers to open fire on Afghan civilians in 2010. Mathew Golsteyn had been stripped of his Special Forces tab and was awaiting trial for murder. Then there was Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher. Gallagher had become a Fox News cause célèbre. His fellow SEALs had turned him in, calling him “toxic” and even “evil.” They told investigators that in Iraq, Gallagher had shot civilians with relish—“burkas were flying,” they quoted him saying—and used a hunting knife to slit the throat of an ISIS captive. Gallagher was acquitted of the most serious charges, but even after the White House clemency, Trump intervened to ensure that Navy Special Warfare Command did not oust Gallagher from the SEALs, a decision that cost Trump his navy secretary. The president was redeeming not only Gallagher, Golsteyn, and Lorance, but the exceptionalist strain on the right that held that American troops, by virtue of being Americans, could not commit atrocities, especially not against so frustrating and subhuman an enemy. To Trump, their service was honorable because of their brutality, and those opposed to it, even if they were in uniform, showed their dishonor. “I stuck up for three great warriors,” Trump told a MAGA rally in Florida, “against the Deep State.”

  To his constituents, whom he had promised victory, none of Trump’s Forever War contradictions mattered, if they noticed them at all. Trump successfully positioned himself as an opponent of the War on Terror simply through his derision of the status quo. None of his escalations, at home or abroad, undermined that narrative in the eyes of either elite media or his supporters. MAGA was less interested in ending the war than in wresting control of it from the Security State. Nowhere did that struggle manifest more heatedly than where the fissure between the Security State and the right first emerged after 9/11: the intelligence agencies.

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  AMONG TRUMP’S GOVERNMENT APPOINTEES, Islamophobia was practically de rigueur. Shortly before arriving at the White House, budget chief Russell Vought wrote that Muslims stood “condemned” for rejecting Jesus. Trump’s pick for the International Organization on Migration, Ken Isaacs, withdrew from contention after his social-media habits of blaming Islam for terrorism emerged. A Health and Human Services official, Ximena Barreto, had called Islam a “cult” with no place in America, something she had in common with the USAID religious freedom adviser Mark Kevin Lloyd. Pete Hoekstra, the buffoonish House Intelligence Committee chief who suggested that al-Qaeda had penetrated the CIA, became Trump’s ambassador to the Netherlands. He apologized after causing an international incident over 2015 remarks that Muslims had turned imaginary parts of Holland into “no-go zones.” A Flynn appointee on the NSC, Rich Higgins, was fired after McMaster learned he had penned a memo portraying Trump as under attack from a “cultural Marxist” cabal that united “the Deep State,” “Islamists,” Black Lives Matter, and others (“ANTIFA working with Muslim Brotherhood doing business as MSA [Muslim Students’ Association] and CAIR”).

  For its part the broader MAGA movement built up an intense fury aimed at a bloc of four progressive Democrats elected to Congress in the 2018 election. The Squad was an alliance of four nonwhite women who championed the multiracial working class. Two of them, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, were Muslims; Omar became the first U.S. representative to wear a hijab. She and Massachusetts’s Ayanna Pressley were Black. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a democratic socialist from the Bronx who terrified the Democratic power structure in New York, and many on the left cheered her willingness to do the same to the Democratic power structure in Washington.

  MAGA forgot its pretenses to working-class politics by mocking Ocasio-Cortez for having worked as a bartender. But the fury it directed at Omar was distinct. Having come to the U.S. as a child refugee from Somalia, Omar represented a diverse Minneapolis, politically and metaphysically, that anti-Islam nativists had been warning for thirty years was white replacement in progress. Smear campaigns circulated, particularly on Facebook, attempting to depict her as an incest practitioner and, inevitably, a terrorist. At a rally in North Carolina in July 2019, Trump said Omar blamed America for terrorism. Months later she asked a judge to show compassion to a New York man convicted of threatening to put a bullet in her skull. If MAGA recognized the Squad as a threat to nationalism, in Omar it saw a threat to national security.

  Trump, however, had the same recommendation for all of them, which he tweeted that July: “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came?” In case there was any doubt that he was informing them that they were not truly American, he clarified that the Squad “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe.” These congresswomen had the temerity, he continued, to “loudly and viciously” tell “the people of the United States” how to run their affairs. Trump’s crowd at a North Carolina rally days later singled out Omar and chanted, “Send her back!”

  Open cheering for civilizational brutality was a spark dropped onto the tinder of white terrorist violence, whose adherents prepared to mete out the vigilante justice they considered the state too fearful to execute. Before and during Trump’s first months in office, the various militant factions aligned with the emboldened alt-right clashed in street skirmishes with left-wing counterprotesters. They told themselves white genocide was at hand, that BLM was destroying their cultural patrimony, and that they were broadly under attack from a censorious liberal culture and specifically from left-wing anti-fascist warriors. Some styled themselves militants, a fetishized posture adopted from over fifteen years of war; some of them, as Daryl Johnson had warned, had actual military experience. Ten people were injured in a summer 2016 melee in Sacramento, where 30 white supremacists, including some from Matthew Heimbach’s Traditionalist Worker Party, were outnumbered by 350 anti-fascists. In New Orleans the following May, white nationalists wearing makeshift armor from sporting-goods stores took the measure of anti-racist demonstrators calling for the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue during a tense but ultimately nonviolent confrontation.

  In mid-August a white supremacist convocation called Unite the Right planned to march on Charlottesville, Virginia. The night before the event, white supremacists wearing polo shirts and carrying tiki torches chanted “Jews will not replace us” and “white lives matter” as they marched to confront demonstrators at another statue of Lee. Trump said there were “very fine people, on both sides” of the fascist versus anti-fascist fracas. The following day was uglier. Hundreds of white supremacists paraded through Charlottesville, attacking anti-racist counterprotesters in a show of force. One of them, an active-duty marine, bragged about “crack[ing] three skulls open.” A group of six, including a man wearing a tactical helmet, mobbed anti-racist protester DeAndre Harris in a parking garage, breaking his wrist and tearing open his scalp—but it was Harris, not his assailants, who was served with a misdemeanor assault charge. (Harris hit with a Maglite a man who had attacked his friend with a flagpole.) Not far away, twenty-year-old James Fields drove his Dodge Challenger through the anti-racist lines, much as al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine had recommended, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer.

 
The subsequent law-enforcement scrutiny, media frenzy, and infighting ended up fracturing the alt-right as a force. But Charlottesville was more of a harbinger than a Waterloo for white supremacist violence. Armed militias like the Atomwaffen Division, which trained for a race war and whose members glorified McVeigh, and the Base—literally a translation of “al-Qaeda”—augured a resurgence of American fascist militancy. The leader of the Base, Rinaldo Nazzaro, worked for the Department of Homeland Security from 2004 to 2006, and appears to have spent time in Iraq. The newest wave of white-nationalist militancy fed accelerationist propaganda to extremely online white youth the same way ISIS did to extremely online Muslim youth. Surveillance capitalism was formally agnostic on that point, except that the surveillance capitalists themselves were far quicker to ban jihadists from their platforms than fascists. Less organized forms of terrorism gathered force as well. The worst incident of anti-Semitic violence in American history unfolded in October 2018 in Pittsburgh, when Robert Bowers entered the Tree of Life Synagogue and shot eleven people to death to show that he, the latest American Breivik, would not be replaced. A day earlier police in Florida arrested a Trump superfan, fifty-six-year-old Cesar Sayoc, for mailing pipe bombs to Trump enemies George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and CNN. The following year a deliberate anti-Latino massacre erupted when Patrick Crusius shot dead twenty-two people in a Walmart in El Paso. Like Breivik, Crusius left a manifesto; his vowed to avert a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

  Beginning on chan sites and expanding rapidly through Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, an amorphous Trumpist revenge fantasy called QAnon soon took form. A supposed member of the Security State, Q, claimed Trump was on the cusp of secretly sending a group of pedophilic Trump enemies in Democratic politics and the Deep State to Guantanamo Bay. An accumulation of contrary evidence did not stop its astonishing growth. By summer 2020 QAnon groups on Facebook had at least 1 million members. Among them was Michael Scheuer, who had been part of the CIA’s Renditions Group and its first chief of the Usama bin Laden Unit. Scheuer called Jews “agitators” for “a covert and overt war that is meant to destroy the legitimately elected Trump administration, as well as the American republic and its Constitution.” (In a different post, he confessed, “I am not an admirer of the democratic system as it has evolved in the United States since the Founding.”) Scheuer knew the Security State as well as anyone and wanted its brutality aimed at “gallows-headed traitors,” including Brennan, Obama, Clapper, and, in a separate post, “Nazi-like terrorist groups, such as ANTIFA [and] Black Lives Matter.”