Eighty-eight percent of Republicans and
40 percent of the general public support Trump. Judging by the last few months of polling, a significantly larger portion backs his national security agenda. Half the country supports a temporary
ban on Muslim immigration; 44 percent
favor a registry for Muslims already here; 53 percent want to intensify
surveillance of US mosques; and 63 percent endorse the
torture of terror suspects. In the latest
Pew survey on the subject, voters say Trump would do a better job than Clinton defending the country from future terrorist attacks.
It’s tempting to attribute these authoritarian sentiments to Trump’s demagoguery alone. But Trump didn’t generate an appetite for reactionary reform by himself. The seeds were planted long ago — sown in that cryptic conversation between Hayden and Tenet, and thousands like it in the halls of power since.
If a constituency exists for Trump’s extreme anti-terror agenda it’s because Republicans and Democrats alike have spent the last fifteen years cultivating paranoia, secrecy, and deference to executive authority — while
vastly overstating the threat of attacks on American soil.
For fifteen years, the US government has waged a war on terror premised on the idea that the extraordinary threat of global terrorism demands extraordinary measures, that the effective prevention of terrorist plots demands sacrifices of civil liberties, and that rooting out terror across the globe necessitates an expansion of what is permissible under traditional norms of war. For fifteen years, the state has been “playing to the edge” and beyond
— enabling the emergence of a candidate who doesn’t know or care where the edge is.
Foreign policy elites made their own bed; now Trump is sleeping in it.
Indeed, many of the elites now criticizing Trump were content to allow Islamophobia and irrational fear to fuel their war on terror, so long as it was coded in the Teflon language of “national security.”
Take John Yoo, author of the
Torture Memos. No figure is more responsible for the legal architecture of the war on terror than Yoo. Bush and Cheney relied on his opinions to preemptively justify their violations of the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions.
In March, Yoo
condemned Trump’s position on waterboarding. He did so not because he’s had a change of heart about the morality or legality of what he calls “enhanced interrogation,” but rather because Trump implied he would use torture as a means of punishment.
“That’s not what its purpose is,” Yoo insisted. “The purpose of it is not to take revenge for past acts. It’s to figure out what to do now to get intelligence to stop future attacks.”
Trump, by refusing to coat his language in nat. sec. legalese, revealed an uncomfortable truth: that torture has always been ineffective, motivated as much by spite as by a belief in its intelligence value. For Yoo, that was the unforgivable offense.
Both kind of saying the same thing there.