By all accounts, what we’re seeing now is Trump being nice. If that’s the case, it’s going to be a very long four years. The last week has been very similar to the closing weeks of the campaign – very staid public appearances, not a tremendous amount of exposure to the press, but quite a lot of drunk tweeting. The somewhat restrained dressing down of VP-elect Mike Pence (who my wife and I keep calling Bike Pants) at the musical Hamilton drew a flurry of outrage from @RealDonaldTrump mostly centered on how “unfair” the cast members were being. This man is so fucking thin-skinned, it’s kind of terrifying. What the hell is he going to do when foreign leaders start trash-talking him?
Let me see if I can guess: whatever his last advisor told him to do. Unfortunately, the two corner offices of the White House will be occupied by two of the most unstable people in his entourage – former Breitbart editor (and man who looks like he spent the last two months sleeping under a bridge) Steve Bannon, who helped buoy the now famous alt-right movement, and General Michael Flynn, who feigns a pretty good imitation of General Jack Ripper from Dr. Strangelove. This makes the Trump White House what may be described as an attractive nuisance, in a way. It seems likely that terror groups will be even more emboldened to mount a spectacular attack on the United States, since they know these people are far more likely than Obama to overreact. Violent overreaction is just what they want from us. Just ask them.
The other thing they want is a war between the United States and all Muslims. Here again, Flynn and Bannon will prove invaluable. Some of Flynn’s comments have placed Muslims of all stripes under suspicion, presenting them as something Americans should be afraid of – presumably, Americans who are not Muslims. This, coupled with the blood libel Trump engaged in during the campaign (namely the bogus story about thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the 9/11 attacks back in 2001), have driven xenophobic sentiment to the point where some mild discouragement from the president-elect feels like window-dressing. People who voted for Trump on the strength of his bigoted appeal will insist that he act to remove, say, Somalis from their whitebread towns. Again, this kind of stupidity I’m sure warms the cold hearts of ISIS.
One can only hope that Trump’s new advisor – Joe Scarborough – can talk him out of this … at least when Joe’s not pretending to be an independent-minded talk show host. (I almost wrote “journalist”, but then you would have just laughed at me.)
luv u,
jp
This is what happens in America when anything like a foreign-inspired terror attack takes place: we want to corral all Muslims and start bombing some country most of us couldn’t find on a globe with both hands. I’ve lived through many cycles of this, from the Iran hostage crisis through the first gulf war, to the embassy bombings in the late 1990s and on into the 9/11 era. I can remember a Muslim friend from Bosnia being a bit taken aback by the rhetoric and the kind of full-on nationalism pushed through the corporate media that came about after Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998. It’s times like these when Muslims – and yes, people with beards and headscarves more generally – feel compelled to start looking over their shoulders.