Fight Trump Like a Terrorist Leader, National Security Experts Say

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Further reporting since the insurrection has heightened concerns about the failure of law enforcement leadership, according to interviews with current and former national security officials. Among the mob and those who invaded the Capitol there was widespread use of two-way radio communications, tactical gear, chemical munitions, and what law enforcement officials believe may have been a diversionary planting of pipe bombs. Particularly grim was the participation by some police officers and ex-military personnel in the siege. Did agency leaders installed by Trump or who were sympathetic to his lies about the 2020 election look the other way from looming danger on their radar?

“Either they were complicit or willingly ignorant of what they needed to do to prepare,” says Marisa Randazzo, a leading threat assessment professional and former chief research psychologist for the US Secret Service. “We saw Washington prepare for the Black Lives Matter protests last summer with National Guard presence that was significant, in numbers and optics. Here, there was a noticeable absence that never should’ve happened.”

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With a clear and present danger of further violence in state capitols and the nation’s capital, it may be that incitement from the president himself remains the gravest threat, despite his recent deplatforming by tech companies. Remarkably, some national security experts who have sounded the alarm about Trump’s many months of deliberately inciting violence are now talking about the end game of his presidency in the stark terms of counterterrorism. Trump must be seen as “the operational leader of this domestic terrorism effort,” said Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary of Homeland Security, who was among the first experts to call out Trump’s use of terrorist tactics. “He tells them where to go. He tells them what to do. He tells them why they’re angry. So we need to start at the top, like with any counterterrorism effort, which is total isolation of the president of the United States. Impeachment, yes. Twenty-fifth amendment, yes. Deplatforming, yes. No money, no access to campaign funds…What we have to make sure [of] is that Donald Trump does not have a second act.”

This is crucial, Kayyem told me, for shaming and tamping down far-right extremism that has taken hold among some pro-Trump elements in law enforcement. “These ideologies are given voice and comfort by the president, so there’s a fearlessness with some of these guys in law enforcement, that they would post pictures or go to a rally and do something so illegal and think that there are no consequences. All of that, I think, is tied to the radicalization that is unique to Trump.”

Kayyem acknowledges that her language sounds harsh—but she is adamant that counterterrorism is the necessary framework for confronting the peril the nation is now facing, both in tactical and symbolic terms. “This is how to think about it, no forgiveness, not now,” she says. Figuratively speaking, she adds, that includes “total decapitation.”