Transforming 9/11 Into Trump Derangement Syndrome
Writing on the Foreign Affairs website on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by Islamic terrorists, two former Clinton and Obama administration national security officials claim that the war on terror that resulted from the 9/11 attacks led to the “unraveling of American democracy” in the form of the “authoritarianism” of the Trump presidency.
Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon both served in the State Department and on the National Security Council during times when the U.S. responded ineffectually to the growing threat of Islamic terrorism (Clinton presidency) and later when the U.S. simultaneously continued the war on terror while apologizing for America’s past sins in the Middle East (Obama presidency).
It is no wonder that Benjamin and Simon ignore the flawed foreign policies they helped to formulate and implement and instead blame the Trump presidency for its efforts to undo the damage caused by his predecessors. (RELATED: What We Must ‘Never Forget’ 25 Years After 9/11)
They lament the rise of “Islamophobia” and anti-immigrant sentiment, especially pronounced, they claim, in the Trump presidencies.
Benjamin and Simon criticize the U.S. “fixation on Islamic terror,” which they claim “shaped a culture drenched in fear, as voices from politics, the media, civil society, and a swelling counterterrorism-industrial complex insisted that the country faced an existential threat.” Apparently, the authors believe that our Islamic enemies who have repeatedly killed Americans since at least 1979, if not before (as Norman Podhoretz pointed out in a series of articles in Commentary which were later collected into a book titled World War IV), and who 25 years ago attacked the American homeland, are a narrow group of extremists rather than the vanguard of what Samuel Huntington rightly called a “clash of civilizations.”
They lament the rise of “Islamophobia” and anti-immigrant sentiment, especially pronounced, they claim, in the Trump presidencies. While praising some of the successes in the war on terror, Benjamin and Simon claim that 2016 was a “hinge” year when the focus of our efforts shifted from the external war on terror to the “other” war on terror at home — a war against Muslims and immigrants waged by the Trump administration.
Trump’s war on terror, they claim, is a war on American democracy. Their evidence for this claim is Trump’s “Muslim travel ban,” his designation of Antifa (which the authors call a decentralized, left-wing movement against white supremacy and fascism) as a domestic terror group, his focus on attacks against Christians and conservatives, his use of military strikes against seaborne drug traffickers, his deployment of National Guard troops to quell left-wing, anti-government violence in major cities, including the nation’s capital, and his crackdown on illegal immigration.
Trump, the authors argue, has vastly expanded executive power and “radicalized” portions of the population, transforming war veterans into a kind of Freikorps (the left never tires of the Trump-Nazi-Hitler comparisons). All of this, they claim, is traceable to our unwarranted reactions to the 9/11 attacks.
So, while our 9/11 commemorations include remembering the “awful events of that day,” reading names of those killed, lighting candles, and reflecting on the mistakes made in Iraq and Afghanistan, Benjamin and Simon want the focus to shift to the consequences at home, namely, the rise of Trump and MAGA, which they claim is a greater threat to America than our Islamic enemies.
The left in this country praises executive power when it is used for liberal purposes. When conservatives use it, however, it supposedly becomes dangerous. And when Donald Trump uses it, the sky is about to fall on American democracy. The authors, who participated in administrations whose foreign policies helped to create the dangers we now face abroad, blame Donald Trump for his relentless efforts to eliminate or lessen those dangers. This is how Trump Derangement Syndrome even affects commemorations of 9/11.
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