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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Terrorism and the Presidency
00:14:52
The attacks last weekend reignited fears about how well guarded the country is against extremist violence at home. John Cassidy and Steve Coll join Dorothy Wickenden to discuss what really fosters hate groups, and how Clinton and Trump are addressing the issue of homeland security.
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- [00:00]
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- [01:17]
Dorothy Wickenden
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, September 22nd. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. On Tuesday, after a weekend of terrorist attacks in the United States, Barack Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly. He spoke about the extremist movements inspired by sectarianism and religious fundamentalism around the world.
- [01:43]
Barack Obama
We cannot dismiss these visions. They are powerful. They reflect dissatisfaction among too many of our citizens. I do not believe those visions can deliver security or prosperity over the long term, but I do believe that these visions fail to recognize, at a very basic level, our common humanity. Moreover, I believe that the acceleration of travel and technology and telecommunications, together with a global economy that depends on a global supply chains, makes itself defeating. Ultimately, for those who seek to reverse this progress today, a nation ringed by walls would only imprison itself.
- [02:26]
Dorothy Wickenden
John Cassidy and Steve Kahl join me to discuss how the two current presidential candidates are addressing terrorism and national security. Steve Listening to Obama this week and reading about the most recent attacks in New York and New Jersey and Minnesota. I remembered a piece you wrote here in 2012 after an attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and you wrote how we tend to misconstrue potential threats. Could you just remind us a little bit about what you were talking about with patterns of terrorism?
- [03:00]
Steve Kahl
Yeah. That was inspired by some pretty deep research about domestic terrorism cases in the United States, where the researchers coded criminal convictions and prosecutions across a period of time after 9, 11 to ask, so what does terrorism look like? And the answer was pretty surprising. I think about a fifth of the cases involved what you might describe as right wing or racist motivated terrorist plots. All of the cases involving weapons of mass destruction, meaning crude chemical weapons and even biological weapons, were located in that space. And so, you know, we think of terrorism because of the prominence after September 11 of jihadist violence, which is rising now, to be sure, in the United States and Europe, but in fact, sort of like mass shootings. If you really want to step back and look at the problem, you have to take a much wider view than just the category of jihadist or ISIS inspired violence.
- [04:08]
Dorothy Wickenden
When we last spoke about this, Donald Trump wasn't on the scene and we weren't in the midst of this horrifying presidential campaign. But John, I wanted to ask you, we have the first presidential debate coming up on Monday. Certainly this will be a question. We know how they're going to respond. Hillary is going to call Trump a recruiting sergeant for the terrorists, as she has been this week. Trump's going to reiterate yet again the need for extreme vetting of Muslim immigrants. And as always, she's going to have the more difficult, complicated case to make. How do you see this playing out?
- [04:41]
John Cassidy
Well, as you say, I think it's going to be, if not the dominating theme of the debate, one of the major ones. It's a very tricky question this, because if you look at the polling data, it's not what you would expect. There's a sort of common assumption that anything wreaking of terrorism or havoc on the streets plays to Republicans and plays to Donald Trump. But in the polling data, there's not actually much support for that. If you look back at the reactions, for example, to the Orlando attack, there was very little of bounds for Trump, if any, bounce for Trump. And if you look at just the sort of plain questions in the polling data, who's best at dealing with terrorism and homeland security, it's basically evenly divided. I just looked up the new Wall Street Journal NBC poll, and it's Trump 43, Clinton 44. I mean, the Republicans will be hoping that just the very fact that the topic of debate will be terrorism and what happened in New York and Minnesota will help Trump. But I don't think that's automatically true. Clinton's experience and a sort of perceived calmness under pressure seems to also, you know, resonate with the public. There was another question in this poll about who has the right temperament to be president, and Trump only got 23% there and Clinton got 56. Now, one of the things going into that must be, you know, what sort of temperament do you have to respond to a crisis? That's a long answer. I think the short answer is Trump has to show that he's not just full of bluster and that he'd actually be capable of handling a sort of terrorist attack. And Clinton has to play to a sort of existing strength, that she certainly has that temperament and has the sort of expert.
- [06:22]
Dorothy Wickenden
So what about that, Steve? Trump has based his entire campaign on fear. We've discussed this quite a bit on this program. Is it going to continue to serve him well in the debates? It got him to the nomination.
- [06:35]
Steve Kahl
Social science supports what John observed, which is that it's clear from diverse research over a long period of time that fear of terrorism does affect voting, but what it drives people toward are trusted incumbent leaders. And neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton fits exactly the mold of someone who typically benefits from fear of terrorism on the eve of an election. President Obama does. Unfortunately, he's not on the ballot. Trump suffers because he is seen, correctly, as erratic and lacking the kind of temperament that can manage a crisis effectively. And while Hillary Clinton has the sort of resume of an incumbent, she hasn't established the kind of trust that someone with her background would normally have. And so she does have the opportunity, I think, to, in the debates, establish herself as a trusted, steady leader. But it will require managing the incendiary rhetorical environment that Trump thrives on and that he will certainly bring to this set of debates. She's quite good under pressure. She's very good live. She's very good at flipping male aggression back on the aggressor. She, you know, she's done this, it seems, quite naturally over the years. But the stakes here are going to be very, very high. And there's nobody like Trump in his willingness to go, you know, out of bounds on a live stage.
- [08:08]
Katie Drummond
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director. I'm Michael Coloury, Wired's director of consumer, Tech and Culture.
- [08:14]
Dorothy Wickenden
And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley, is about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [08:23]
Katie Drummond
And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week, we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics.
- [08:33]
John Cassidy
Right.
- [08:33]
Katie Drummond
So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are affecting Washington and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [08:53]
Dorothy Wickenden
Steve, just getting back to what you were saying earlier about the truth of what we should be worried about versus the perception of what we should be worried about. And I was looking this morning at some statistics compiled by the Southern Poverty Law center last year, and they have tracked almost 900 extremist groups in this country, and they found a 14% increase in hate groups and patriot groups. So Hillary's beginning to get at that, that in her message she's saying, you should be worried about Trump because he's really creating a wave of violence. How do you think she should address that?
- [09:24]
Steve Kahl
My own instinct is that she should be forthright about that. And to me, the best moments of her campaign have come when she has delivered an energized defense of American pluralism, as at the convention with the father of Humayun Khan, a US army officer who died in combat in Iraq and whose father made that electric speech. And in the aftermath of that, Trump's incendiary, ugly response seemed to rebound on him. And the Clinton campaign seemed to really have confidence that they could really organize themselves around confronting not just Trump's own bigoted words, but the fellow travelers, the extreme groups. And look, you don't have to go digging around too deeply to find what's happening in this season. Just go on Facebook and Twitter. I mean, there are fellow travelers of the Trump campaign, at least they identify themselves that way, anonymous and otherwise, who are just spreading poison and carrying out attacks. And the American people are living this. It's not something removed from them. So I think speaking to it directly and challenging him about it just seems like the right thing to do. I think it happens also to be good politics.
- [10:40]
Dorothy Wickenden
What about that, John?
- [10:42]
John Cassidy
Yeah, I agree with Steve on most of that. I think Trump has got an opportunity here if he handles it properly. I think if he just goes off in what of his sort of crazy rants, I'm not sure it will help him here. I think if he gets a bit more specific and focuses on the New York case and what the questions it raises about sort of vetting and border security, surveillance and things like that. When he talks about that, he seems to get a bump in the polls. But I think he'd do better to speak about it calmly rather than to just accuse the Democrats and Hillary of basically putting the country into mortal danger, which is what he usually does.
- [11:20]
Dorothy Wickenden
I was on the train to work on Monday morning when suddenly everyone's iPhone started shrieking that terrifying high pitched call it sends out. And it was the wanted alert that helped lead to the capture of Ahmed Khan Rouhami, along with camera footage showing him planting a bomb in Chelsea. Steve, what other kinds of surveillance tactics are we going to be seeing in coming years?
- [11:41]
Steve Kahl
Well, I think there's already a surveillance regime that you get glimpses of when these cases surface. I mean, the Rohami case was a failure in the sense that border customs agents referred his name to some kind of Orwellian sounding target center. And then these joint terrorism task forces that bring police and the FBI and intelligence agencies together in every city conduct reviews. There is an enormous amount of online surveillance associated with ISIS communications. You can be sure that if you access a website or a Twitter feed or the late Anwar El Aoulkis Inspire magazine that you will be reviewed. The difficulty in these cases though is appropriately, under our Constitution, speech does not constitute a basis for a criminal investigation. The policing toolkit is pretty limited, I think if you ask about prevention, neither candidate has much of an answer for the problem of homegrown radicalization. Clinton is more sophisticated about it because her is studying the models that are available in Europe. In Britain, the best of these involve promoting community policing and social integration. It's very difficult to achieve. But you know, there are some examples that work better than others. I mean, we don't really have that model, in part because we've had a limited experience with domestic radicalization of this kind and also because our Muslim American population is really quite small as a percentage of the whole.
- [13:22]
Dorothy Wickenden
And what about the lone wolf attacks?
- [13:25]
Steve Kahl
You know, the most effective attacks are either a lone wolf who gets an assault rifle and is not stopped before he's killed a lot of people. And that kind of shooting can be jihad, as motivated as in Orlando, apparently, or it can just be a deranged individual or an individual or a small group, make some kind of significant contact with professional bomb makers or tacticians and are equipped, trained, motivated to carry out a more sophisticated, complex attack. The lone wolf who runs down a shopping mall with a knife, as this Somali American did in Minnesota over the weekend. You know, those are frightening and disruptive, but they don't generally take a high toll. So the difference between a singleton versus even a small group or an individual who travels abroad and makes contact with ISIS trainers can make a big difference to how significant the attack is. This New York bombing, that pressure cooker bomb, was described by the police as very potent and very sophisticated, but it wasn't the kind of really effective improvised explosive device that a. A real pro would have built.
- [14:41]
Dorothy Wickenden
Final question for you, John. Trump suggested last week that Clinton's bodyguards should disarm and see what happens to her. It's the second time he's used the Second Amendment to imply threat against her. That, too, will come up, I assume. And that gets us into the whole question about gun control. How should she be handling that?
- [14:59]
John Cassidy
Well, I think that one should play to Clinton's advantage, surely. I mean, Trump basically went off the reservation on this one in the last few weeks. He's stuck to the teleprompter a lot more than he has in the past and avoided sort of gaffes. I think this was a gaffe. Of course Clinton should bring it up. If the moderators don't bring it up, I think there will be a big effort on Clinton's part to point to a lot of these inflammatory statements that Trump has made and ask him whether, you know, he stands by them. There's going to be a lot of policy debate there, and obviously that's important. But I think these debates always come down to one or two or three moments, as they call them in the business, which get played back endlessly on TV and social media. And I'd be surprised if they are sort of policy exchanges. I think they're more likely to be sparked by one of Trump's inflammatory statements. I think that will be part of the Clinton strategy to sort of make Trump seem unhinged.
- [16:02]
Dorothy Wickenden
Thank you both so much. John Cassidy and Steve Kahl are staff writers. John is the author of How Markets the Logic of Economic Calamities. And Steve is the author of Ghost the Secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan and bin Laden. From the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001, this has been the political Scene from the New Yorker. You can find more political analysis and commentary on New Yorker Dodge or on the New Yorker apps, available at no extra charge from the App Store and Google Play. And you can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app. The Political Scene is produced by Alex Barron and Jill duboff for new yorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
- [16:52]
Katie Drummond
Katie I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director. I'm Michael Colory, Wired's director of consumer, Tech and Culture.
- [16:59]
Dorothy Wickenden
And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley is all about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [17:09]
Katie Drummond
At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech, Right? So whether we're talking about privacy, AI, social media, or a major tech figure, we will always explain the Silicon Valley forces behind these stories and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [17:40]
Steve Kahl
From PRX.