From 9/11 to Manchester Donald Trump found out something about the presidency and the world on this trip. By Daniel Henninger
https://www.wsj.com/articles/from-9-11-to-manchester-1495665007
Now we have Manchester and its 22 dead, many of them children. Somehow, we always end up back at 9/11, leaving flowers and candles again.
A political constant since 9/11 is that terrorism inevitably changes U.S. presidencies. I think the events this week—the president’s overseas trip and then Manchester—may have a similar effect on Donald Trump.
On Inauguration Day in January 2001, George W. Bush’s mind no doubt was filled with plans for his first term. Months later, his was a war presidency and would remain so.
Several things sit in my memory from the politics of that period. One is President Bush’s face as he addressed Congress on Sept. 20. He was a changed man. Also remembered is the solidarity of national purpose after the attack. The final memory is how quickly that unity dissipated into a standard partisan melee.
The Democratic point of attack became the Patriot Act’s surveillance provisions, a legal and legislative battle that ran the length of the Bush presidency. By the end of his second term, George Bush had become an object of partisan caricature and antipathy equal to anything President Trump endures now.
During Barack Obama’s presidency, four major terrorist attacks took place inside the U.S.: Fort Hood in 2009, the Boston Marathon in 2013, San Bernardino two years later and then Orlando in 2016. During these years, the locus of terror migrated from al Qaeda to Islamic State.
Volumes have been written about Barack Obama and terrorism, much of it about the president’s struggles with vocabulary terms such as war, Islam, extreme and radical. The killing of Osama bin Laden evinced a rare, passing moment of national unity.
With the opposition to the Trump presidency programmed for driverless resistance, there will be no national unity in the war on terrorism. The Democrats have become the Trump-Is-Russia Party, and that may be as good a way as any for them to spend their waking hours.
But even Hillary Clinton couldn’t duck the terrorism problem in the 2016 presidential campaign, and when Mr. Trump said he would “defeat ISIS,” his lack of nuance no doubt won him votes.
Which brings us to Manchester this week and memories of 9/11.
Note the political response to the Manchester murders. Again, total solidarity, such as this from European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker : “These cowardly attacks will only strengthen our commitment to work together to defeat the perpetrators of such vile acts.”
Post-9/11, naturally one expects such commitments to erode like sand castles. But this time, by coincidence, alleged Manchester bomber Salman Abedi murdered concertgoers in the same week Donald Trump was using his first overseas trip to build a coalition to defeat Islamic State. CONTINUE AT SITE
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