No Is Not Enough

by Naomi Klein

  The presence of highly militarized police and armed private soldiers in New Orleans came as a surprise to many. Since then, the phenomenon has expanded exponentially, with local police forces across the country outfitted to the gills with military-grade gear, including tanks and drones, and private security companies frequently providing training and support. Given the array of private-military and security contractors occupying key positions in the Trump administration, we can expect all of this to expand further with each new shock.

  The Katrina experience also stands as a stark warning to those who are holding out hope for Trump’s promised trillion dollars in infrastructure spending. That spending will fix some roads and bridges, and it will create jobs (though—as we’ll see in Chapter 10—far less than green infrastructure investment to transition off fossil fuels would). Crucially, Trump has indicated that he plans to do as much as possible not through the public sector but through public-private partnerships—which have a terrible track record for corruption, and may result in far lower wages than true public works projects would. Given Trump’s business record, and Pence’s role in the administration, there is every reason to fear that his big-ticket infrastructure spending could become a Katrina-like kleptocracy, a government of thieves, with the Mar-a-Lago set helping themselves to vast sums of taxpayer money.

  New Orleans provides a harrowing picture of what we can expect when the next shock hits. But sadly, it is far from complete: there is much more that this administration may try to push through under cover of crisis. To become shock resistant, we need to prepare for that too.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE TOXIC TO-DO LIST

  WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU ARE EXPECTING A CRISIS

  In New Orleans after Katrina, some of the key players who now surround Trump showed to what lengths they will go to decimate the public sphere and advance the interests of real estate developers, private contractors, and oil companies. Today, they are in a position to take Katrina national.

  What makes this constellation of disaster capitalists all the more worrying is the fact that, though Trump has been able to do a great deal of damage in his first few months in office, he has been repeatedly stymied by the courts and by Congress. And many of the more radical items on this administration’s wish list have yet to be attempted at all. His education secretary, Betsy DeVos, for instance, has devoted her life to pushing for a privatized education system like the one in New Orleans after Katrina. Many of the figures who surround Trump are passionate about dismantling Social Security. Several are equally fervent in their distaste for a free press, unions, and political protests. Trump himself has mused publicly about bringing in “the feds” to deal with crime in cities like Chicago, and on the campaign trail he pledged to block all Muslims from entering the US, not just the ones from the countries on his various lists. His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has been highly critical of police department “consent decrees,” an important measure that allows the Justice Department and federal courts to intervene in local and state police forces if they identify a pattern of abuse—for example, repeated shootings of unarmed Black people. Sessions claims these accountability mechanisms “can reduce morale for the police officers,” impairing their ability to fight crime (a claim unsupported by the data).

  The wealthiest funders of Trump’s campaign and of the Far Right more broadly—the multibillionaire Koch Brothers and the Mercer family—have their sights set on eliminating the remaining restrictions on money in politics, while doing away with those laws that require transparency in how such private money is spent. Under the guise of battling a manufactured “voting fraud” crisis, they are also backing groups that have been pushing measures to make it even harder for low-income people and minorities to vote, such as rules requiring photo ID to cast a ballot (some form of these initiatives had already been enacted in at least thirty-two states by the time Trump was elected). If these twin goals are fully realized, progressive challengers will be so outspent by their Republican rivals, and will have so much trouble getting their supporters into voting booths, that the corporate coup Trump represents could well become permanent.

  Realizing the full breadth of this antidemocratic vision is not achievable in the current circumstances. Without a crisis, the courts would keep getting in the way, as would several state governments controlled by Democrats, and on some of Trump’s more sadistic dreams—like bringing back torture—even Congress might stand up to him.

  But the full agenda is still there, lying in wait. Which is why author and journalist Peter Maass, writing in the Intercept, described the Trump White House as “a pistol cocked to go off at the first touch”—or rather, the first crisis. As Milton Friedman wrote long ago, “only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” Survivalists stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; these guys stockpile spectacularly antidemocratic ideas.

  So the questions we need to focus on are these: What disaster, or series of disasters, could play the enabling role? And what tasks on the toxic to-do list are most likely to rear their heads at these first opportunities?

  It’s high time for some disaster preparedness.

  States of Emergency, States of Exception

  During the campaign, some imagined that the more overtly racist elements of Trump’s platform were just talk designed to rile up the base, not anything he seriously intended to act on. In Trump’s first week in office, when he imposed a travel ban on seven majority-Muslim countries, that comforting illusion disappeared fast. And the response was immediate. In major cities across the United States, thousands upon thousands of people left their homes and flooded to the airports, demanding that the ban be revoked and that the travelers being detained be released. Taxi drivers in New York refused to take fares to or from JFK airport, local politicians and lawyers showed up in droves to help the people under detention, and a federal court judge finally intervened to block the ban. When Trump slightly modified his executive order and reissued it, another judge got in his way.

  The whole episode showed the power of resistance, and of judicial courage, and there was much to celebrate. But we can’t forget that a terrorist attack in the United States would provide the administration with a pretext to try to override much of this kind of pushback. In all likelihood they would do it swiftly, by declaring protests and strikes that block roads and airports a threat to “national security,” and then using that cover to go after protest organizers—with surveillance, arrests, and imprisonment. Many of us well remember the “with us or with the terrorists” atmosphere that descended after September 11—but we don’t need to go back that far to see how these dynamics work.

  In the immediate aftermath of the Westminster terror attacks in London in March 2017, when a driver plowed into a crowd of pedestrians, deliberately killing four people and injuring dozens more, the Conservative government wasted no time declaring that any expectation of privacy in digital communications was now a threat to national security. Home Secretary Amber Rudd went on the BBC and declared the end-to-end encryption provided by programs like WhatsApp to be “completely unacceptable.” And she said that they were meeting with the large tech firms “to ask them to work with us” on providing backdoor access to these platforms.

  In France in 2015, after the coordinated attacks in Paris that killed 130 people, the government of François Hollande declared a “state of emergency” that banned political protests. I was in France a week after those horrific events and it was striking that, though the attackers had targeted a concert, a football stadium, restaurants, and other emblems of daily Parisian life, it was only outdoor political activity that was not permitted. Large concerts, Christmas markets, and sporting events—the sorts of places
that were likely targets for further attacks—were all free to carry on as usual.

  In the months that followed, the state-of-emergency decree was extended again and again—until it had been in place for well over a year. It is currently set to remain in effect until at least July 2017—the new normal. And this took place under a center-left government in a country with a long tradition of disruptive strikes and protests. One would have to be naive to imagine that Donald Trump and Mike Pence wouldn’t immediately seize on any attack in the USA to go much further down that same road. We should be prepared for security shocks to be exploited as excuses to increase the rounding up and incarceration of large numbers of people from the communities this administration is already targeting: Latino immigrants, Muslims, Black Lives Matter organizers, climate activists. It’s all possible. And, in the name of freeing the hands of law enforcement officials, Sessions would have his excuse to do away with federal oversight of state and local police.

  Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that, in the aftermath of an attack, judges would show the same courage in standing up to Trump as they did immediately after his inauguration. As much as they position themselves as neutral arbiters, courts are not immune to public hysteria. And there is no doubt that the President would seize on any domestic terrorist attack to blame the courts. He made this abundantly clear when he tweeted, after his first travel ban was struck down: “Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system.”

  The Dark Prince Is Back

  Trump has made no secret of his interest in torture. “Torture works,” he said on the campaign, “only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work.” He also pledged to fill up Guantanamo with new “bad dudes, believe me, we’re gonna load it up.”

  Legally, this won’t be easy. Ever since the George W. Bush administration found loopholes it could exploit to take a turn toward sadism, the US courts have made it harder for future administrations to follow suit, as has the Senate, which passed an amendment in 2015 clearly stating that all interrogation techniques must follow the Army Field Manual.

  Still, if the country found itself in the grip of a large-enough security crisis, there is no reason to expect that a Republican-controlled House and Senate would refuse the White House the powers it demanded. And Mike Pompeo, Trump’s CIA director, has indicated an alarming openness to going backward. After originally stating unequivocally in his confirmation hearing that he would not allow torture tactics to return, he followed up with an addendum: “If experts believed current law was an impediment to gathering vital intelligence to protect the country, I would want to understand such impediments and whether any recommendations were appropriate for changing current law.” He has also called for a reversal of the limited restrictions on digital surveillance put in place after Edward Snowden’s revelations.

  Even without the blessing of Congress or the CIA, an administration that is determined to violate the law can, unfortunately, find a way. The likeliest route for Trump is to outsource this dirty work to private contractors. None other than Blackwater founder Erik Prince (who happens to be the brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos) has been counseling Trump behind the scenes. Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, who wrote an award-winning book on Blackwater, reports that Prince not only donated $100,000 to a Trump-friendly political action committee but actively advised the transition team “on matters related to intelligence and defense, including weighing in on candidates for the Defense and State departments.” And in April, the Washington Post published a report revealing that

  the United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S., European and Arab officials. The meeting took place around Jan. 11—nine days before Trump’s inauguration—in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, officials said.

  Prince, the Post reported, “presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump.” Through a spokesperson, Prince described the account as “a complete fabrication. The meeting had nothing to do with President Trump.”

  Prince’s appearance in all this is alarming for reasons that go well beyond the revelation of yet another link between the Trump team and Russia. In the wake of a long line of lawsuits and investigations (in 2014, a US federal jury found four Blackwater employees guilty on charges including first-degree murder in a massacre in Baghdad’s Nisour Square that left seventeen people dead), Prince attempted to rename Blackwater and finally sold the company. He now has a new firm: Frontier Services Group. He is getting in on the anti-immigrant frenzy sweeping the globe, pitching the company as the most efficient way to keep migrants from successfully crossing borders. In Europe, he makes the case that by paying his company to work in Libya, countries can “secure land borders and so prevent migrants from reaching the Mediterranean.” Writing in the Financial Times in early 2017, Prince explained that if his plan were implemented, “there would be nowhere for migrant smugglers to hide: they can be detected, detained and handled using a mixture of air and ground operations”—all private, all for-profit.

  Prince’s resurfacing is a reminder that there are many backdoor ways around constitutional practices. And Trump, as well as other leaders, can turn to companies like his for surveillance, interrogation, and massively ramped-up border controls.

  No, They Don’t Need to Plan It

  Some have warned that Trump has so much to gain from an atmosphere of heightened fear and confusion, and such a blatant disregard for the truth, that we should expect this administration to cook up its own crises. While it would be unwise to put anything past this constellation of characters, the fact is that nefarious conspiracies may well be unnecessary. After all, Trump’s reckless and incompetent approach to governance is nothing short of a disaster-creation machine.

  Take the administration’s incendiary public statements and policies relating to Muslims and “radical Islamic terrorism.” A decade and a half into the so-called war on terror, it’s not controversial to state the obvious: these kinds of actions and rhetoric make violent responses distinctly more likely. These days, the people warning about this danger most forcefully are not antiracism or antiwar activists, but leading figures in the military and intelligence communities and the foreign policy establishment. They argue that any perception that the United States is at war with Islam as a faith and Muslims as a group is a gift to extremists looking to rationalize bloody attacks on American soldiers and civilians. Daniel L. Bynam, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who served on the Joint 9/11 Inquiry Staff of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, puts it this way: “Trump’s actions and rhetoric add credibility to the jihadists’ narrative of civilizational war.”

  Already, ISIS reportedly described Trump’s first anti-Muslim-travel executive order as a “blessed ban” that will help to recruit fighters. Iran’s foreign minister warned the ban was “a gift to extremists.” Even Trump’s own national security adviser, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, has described Trump’s repeated use of the term “radical Islamic terrorism” as unhelpful because, he says, the terrorists are “un-Islamic.” Yet nothing has changed. Trump seems determined to do everything possible to reinforce the holy war message.

  The idea that Trump doesn’t realize how provocative he’s being rings about as hollow as his claims of being unaware that his racist rhetoric has generated a climate ripe for hate crimes.

  The Shock of War

  The most lethal way that governments overreact to terrorist attacks is by exploiting the atmosphere of fear to embark on a full-blown foreign war. It doesn’t necessarily matter if the target has no connection to the original terror attacks. Iraq wasn’t responsible for 9/11, and it was invaded anyway.

  Trump’s likeliest targets are mostly in the Middle East, and they includ
e (but are by no means limited to) the following: Syria; Yemen, where Trump has already increased the number of drone strikes; Iraq, where deadly strikes with high civilian casualties are also on the rise; and, most perilously, Iran. And then, of course, there’s North Korea. Already, after visiting the demilitarized zone dividing North and South Korea, Secretary of State Tillerson declared “all options are on the table,” pointedly refusing to rule out a preemptive military strike in response to the North Korean regime’s missile testing. This was followed by Trump’s muscle-flexing announcement of the immediate deployment of a US Navy strike group, including two destroyers, a guided-missile cruiser, and a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, to the Korean Peninsula (embarrassingly for the administration, the carrier was photographed thousands of miles away, heading in the opposite direction for joint exercises with the Australian Navy). And it was all underlined by a testosterone-fueled tweet from Trump about how, if China doesn’t step in, “we will solve the problem without them! U.S.A.” North Korean state media, meanwhile, issued a hair-raising declaration that the country was prepared to launch a nuclear attack “in the US mainland.”

  Trump has openly called for a new nuclear “arms race”—a call we have not heard since the 1980s. He has reportedly asked his foreign policy advisers repeatedly why the United States can’t just use nuclear weapons, seemingly not grasping the principle of retaliation. And one of Trump’s biggest financial backers, Sheldon Adelson, has talked about needing to threaten Iran with a nuclear strike in the “middle of the desert that doesn’t hurt a soul…maybe a couple of rattlesnakes…. Then you say, ‘See! The next one is in the middle of Tehran. So, we mean business.’ ” Adelson donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration, the largest donation of its kind ever.