The Clash Was Mrs. Clinton right about Trump and terror recruitment?By James Taranto
Trump responded yesterday: “Hillary Clinton lied last week [sic] when she said ISIS made a D.T. video. The video that ISIS made was about her husband being a degenerate.” Followed by this: “Al-Shabbab [sic], not ISIS, just made a video on me—they all will as front-runner & if I speak out against them, which I must. Hillary lied!” (In fact, Mrs. Clinton made her assertion in a Dec. 19 debate, and al Shabaab is transliterated with one “b” and usually a double “a.”)
Was Mrs. Clinton right? One might charitably speculate that naming the wrong terrorist group was the product of honest confusion. But she framed her assertion not as a prediction but a statement of fact: “They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.” That was false at the time she said it. Was it prescient? Maybe, but if one recasts the statement as a prophecy, it could very well have been a self-fulfilling one. That is, it’s quite possible al Shabaab got the idea from her.
Blogger Tom Maguire observes of another Trump response:
He might want to Trump that up a bit. He might say something like “I’m calling it like I see it and trying to be straight with the American people. If other politicians are picking and choosing their words to stay out of terror videos, well, people can judge their candor for themselves.”
Maguire adds that Trump is not the only American featured in the video (which has reportedly been removed from YouTube as a terms-of-service violation):
The target market seems to be Somalians living in America (read “Minneapolis”). The video opens with Malcom X readings explaining that America is built on racism and includes some snippets of “Black Lives Matter” to show that racism is alive and well today. Trump appears as the video argues that Muslims will become the new blacks, although presumably the prospects for a black Muslim should appear to be especially grim.
Well. No one is going to suggest that the Black Lives Matter people should pipe down. And of course, the basic message that racism is alive and well today could be buttressed with clips from [President] Obama’s former minister [Jeremiah Wright] or Obama himself.
As we noted last week, Obama himself has appeared in ISIS videos, and Trump is correct that so has Mr. Clinton. One may fault the Black Lives Matter movement on any number of grounds, but ISIS’ exploitation of it is not to its discredit. Likewise for Trump. And the idea that enemy propaganda should determine the boundaries of American political debate amounts to a pre-emptive surrender of our country’s most basic principles.
Characteristically, Trump’s response is less cerebral and more emotional. Scott Adams of Dilbert fame breaks it down in a blog post:
Step One: Reframe the situation as validation of Trump being ahead in the polls. Every time he finds a new way to talk about his lead it becomes self-reinforcing. People like winners.
Step Two: Predict MORE videos! That’s a tell for a Master Persuader. It handcuffs whoever makes these videos by making it a validation of his predictive abilities (which he touts).
Step Three: If more videos appear, reframe them as clear evidence of who they fear the most.
Adams has a theory about Trump that he calls the “Master Persuader Hypothesis.” In another recent post, he elaborated:
A master persuader sends crowds into cognitive dissonance and they in turn generate one rationalization after another for what is behind the phenomenon. Obama is a Master Persuader, and that’s why a big chunk of the public still thinks he is a practicing Muslim. When the top persuaders do their thing, about a third of the public can be expected to literally hallucinate.
Now compare Trump, Obama, and Hillary Clinton. Trump is routinely compared to Hitler. Obama is considered by many to be a Muslim sleeper cell. But Hillary Clinton is generally accused of ordinary flaws such as incompetence, dishonesty, etc. [Mrs.] Clinton is not a master persuader. If she were, a third of the country would believe she is a practicing witch. A real one. And no, that is not a joke.
The term “Master Persuader” is a bit enthusiastic for our taste, but we’d certainly agree there’s a connection between political effectiveness and intense, frequently irrational hostility from across the political aisle. The past five two-term presidents—Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama—have all provoked such hostility. (One might argue, contrary to Adams, that so has Mrs. Clinton. But hostility against her is difficult to disentangle from that against her husband.)
At any rate, Adams’s observation about the hallucinatory response to the “Persuader” was prescient. He posted it Dec. 16, three days before Mrs. Clinton made news with her ISIS-video reverie.
Over the weekend we spotted another example of a Trump-induced hallucination. This time the dreamer was National Journal’s Ron Fournier, that fount of conventional wisdom.
“Thanks, Trump,” Fournier sarcastically tweeted, with a link to a New York Times story on the Shabaab video.
Charles Flemming replied: “[How] do we know they didn’t get the idea from Hillary?”
Fournier: “We don’t. We do know his anti-Muslim, war-of-civilizations rhetoric divides Americans and fuels Islamic extremists.”
Of the several flaws in this assertion, one jumped out at this columnist. We asked Fournier: “Can you provide an example of Trump’s ‘war-of-civilizations rhetoric’?”
To which he replied: “There are so many. Guess we could start here: ‘There is a Muslim problem in the world.’ ”
We attempted to probe further: “ ‘There is a problem’ is your idea of a call to war?” The question went unanswered, and thus ended the interrogation.
Here’s what Trump said about the “Muslim problem,” in a March 2011 interview with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly:
O’Reilly: But you do believe overall there is a Muslim problem in the world.
Trump: Well, there is a Muslim problem. Absolutely. You just have to turn on your television set.
O’Reilly: And do you think it encompasses all Muslims?
Trump: No. And that’s the sad part about life. Because you have fabulous Muslims. I know many Muslims and they’re fabulous people. They’re smart. They’re industrious. They’re great. Unfortunately, at this moment in time, there is a Muslim problem in the world. And by the way, and you know it and it I know it and some people don’t like saying it because they think it’s not politically correct.
Yesterday on “Face the Nation,” Trump reiterated the point, in response to a question from host John Dickerson about the al Shabaab video: “They use other people [in videos], too. What am I going to do? I have to say what I have to say. And you know what I have to say? There’s a problem. We have to find out what is the problem and we have to solve that problem.”
The following exchange ensued:
Dickerson: Do you think the problem is a—that the West is on a collision course with radical Islam, or is this just, ISIS is a problem? Is this a clash of civilizations?
Trump: Well, I think that radical Islam may be on a collision course with us. You could change it around a little bit.
But it is a very, very deep-seated hatred that’s going on. I mean, you have a hatred, like people, where they’re willing to give their lives, they’re willing to walk in—I have to tell you, it is so big. It is the biggest thing there is right now. When I watch President Obama say global warming is our biggest problem, it’s just so sad to watch.
And he doesn’t want to use the words radical Islam. He doesn’t want to use anything having to do with radical and Islam. So, until he’s willing to admit the problem—how can you not at least talk about the problem?
And one of the things I have done is, I brought the problem out. The world is talking about what I have said. And now big parts of the world are saying, Trump is really right at least identifying what’s going on. And we have to solve it. But you’re not going to solve the problem unless you identify it.
Note that Dickerson invited Trump to characterize the problem as “a clash of civilizations,” and he demurred. But Fournier isn’t alone in imagining that Trump has spoken of such a clash. In that same Dec. 19 debate, Mrs. Clinton asserted (oddly enough, in response to a question about gun control):
I worry greatly that the rhetoric coming from the Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, is sending a message to Muslims here in the United States and literally around the world that there is a “clash of civilizations,” that there is some kind of Western plot or even “war against Islam,” which then I believe fans the flames of radicalization.
Before our exchange with Fournier, we checked Google to see if Trump had in fact referred to a clash (or, as Fournier put it, war) of civilizations. We found a Nov. 17 MSNBC clip, which Real Clear Politics headlined “ ‘Hardball’ Roundtable: Why Do Rubio & Trump Want a ‘Clash of Civilizations’?” But the segment showed Trump talking only about the aggressive military tactics he would use against ISIS. Rubio—the acceptable, “establishment” candidate—said: “This is a clash of civilizations.”
It seems fair to say that Fournier and Mrs. Clinton are inaccurately describing Trump’s rhetoric—or, to put it another way, that they are responding to something other than his actual words.
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