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Donald Trump Continues to Stoke a Domestic Terrorism Movement [View all]
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/11/trump-domestic-terrorism-january-6/. . .
Trump has made freshly evident, in other words, that he is serving as the inspirational leader for a domestic terrorism movement. His role as such was first openly described by a handful of leading national security experts in the season of his reelection defeat and tumultuous final months in office. Back then, the discussion centered on Trump using tactics of stochastic terrorism, a method of inciting violence veiled in plausible deniability that those experts (and this journalist) recognized from Trump in the run-up to January 6. Two conservative Republicans who left the Trump administration as whistleblowers in 2020, both counterterrorism experts, sounded the alarm, with one referring to Trump’s “coded support” for far-right extremist groups. (Numerous members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who heeded Trump’s call for supporters to descend on DC would soon face conspiracy charges stemming from the assault on Congress.) A third longtime Republican, a former senior national security official in the George W. Bush administration, described Trump as “an arsonist of radicalization.”
As the former president further seeks to rewrite January 6 and stoke incendiary far-right grievances, veiled tactics and plausible deniability are no longer in the equation, according to another expert among those last fall who called out Trump’s tactics. “So much commentary still seems uncomfortable or coy about stating what Trump is doing,” says Juliette Kayyem, who served as an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under President Obama and currently directs national security research at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “He’s not hinting, whistling, or luring these extremists anymore. He’s providing an owner’s manual. I will never understand why we are being so polite about describing this.”
. . .
Trump has made freshly evident, in other words, that he is serving as the inspirational leader for a domestic terrorism movement. His role as such was first openly described by a handful of leading national security experts in the season of his reelection defeat and tumultuous final months in office. Back then, the discussion centered on Trump using tactics of stochastic terrorism, a method of inciting violence veiled in plausible deniability that those experts (and this journalist) recognized from Trump in the run-up to January 6. Two conservative Republicans who left the Trump administration as whistleblowers in 2020, both counterterrorism experts, sounded the alarm, with one referring to Trump’s “coded support” for far-right extremist groups. (Numerous members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who heeded Trump’s call for supporters to descend on DC would soon face conspiracy charges stemming from the assault on Congress.) A third longtime Republican, a former senior national security official in the George W. Bush administration, described Trump as “an arsonist of radicalization.”
As the former president further seeks to rewrite January 6 and stoke incendiary far-right grievances, veiled tactics and plausible deniability are no longer in the equation, according to another expert among those last fall who called out Trump’s tactics. “So much commentary still seems uncomfortable or coy about stating what Trump is doing,” says Juliette Kayyem, who served as an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under President Obama and currently directs national security research at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “He’s not hinting, whistling, or luring these extremists anymore. He’s providing an owner’s manual. I will never understand why we are being so polite about describing this.”
. . .
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