Category Archives: GOP

Is Donald Trump stone broke?

The Washington Post reports: As top Republicans expressed astonishment and alarm over Donald Trump’s paltry campaign fundraising totals, the presumptive nominee blamed party leaders Tuesday and threatened to rely on his personal fortune instead of helping the GOP seek the cash it needs.

New campaign finance reports showing that Trump had less than $1.3 million in the bank heading into June ignited fears that the party will not be able to afford the kind of national field effort that the entire Republican ticket depends on.

The real estate mogul responded by going on the offensive, saying GOP fundraisers have failed to rally around his campaign.

“I’m having more difficulty, frankly, with some of the people in the party,” Trump said on NBC’s “Today,” adding, “They don’t want to come on.”

“If it gets to a point,” he said, “what I’ll do is just do what I did in the primaries,” when he lent his presidential campaign more than $43 million.

The billionaire developer increased his line of credit to the campaign by an additional $2.2 million last month — the smallest amount he has shelled out this year — but Trump said in a statement Tuesday that “if need be, there could be unlimited cash on hand as I would put up my own money.”

It’s unclear how quickly he could access the hundreds of millions needed to finance a national campaign. In May, Trump suggested that to do so, he would have to “sell a couple of buildings.” [Continue reading…]

Josh Marshall writes: Perhaps the most revealing detail about the May filing is that Trump actually did loan his campaign additional funds – a bit over $2 million. But this shows more just how hard up Trump is. His campaign is in desperate need of funds. Like I said, $1.3 million cash on hand is stone broke for a summer presidential campaign. He clearly has no principled resistance to loaning his campaign more money. And he’s in desperate need of a few tens of millions of dollars. Put this together with having to be shamed into coughing up the $1 million contribution to a vets organization and the implication is clear: Trump is very hard pressed to come up with even a few million dollars. And this from a man purportedly worth $10 billion.

Trump’s promises of vast riches got the GOP into a bind relying on him to fund a general election on his own. But that was all a lie. He’s broke or near broke. And the GOP is now facing mid-summer with a campaign that is broke, has no fundraising apparatus, no candidate with big bucks and no field operation. He’s done the GOP worse than the most screwed over creditor he ever sharked. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Nearly half of Sanders supporters won’t support Clinton

Bloomberg reports: In the two weeks since Hillary Clinton wrapped up the Democratic presidential primary, runner-up Bernie Sanders has promised to work hard to defeat Donald Trump — but he’s given no sign he’ll soon embrace Clinton, his party’s presumptive nominee. Neither have many of Sanders’s supporters. A June 14th Bloomberg Politics national poll of likely voters in November’s election found that barely half of those who favored Sanders — 55 percent — plan to vote for Clinton. Instead, 22 percent say they’ll vote for Trump, while 18 percent favor Libertarian Gary Johnson. “I’m a registered Democrat, but I cannot bring myself to vote for another establishment politician like Hillary,” says Laura Armes, a 43-year-old homemaker from Beeville, Texas, who participated in the Bloomberg poll and plans to vote for Trump. “I don’t agree with a lot of what Trump says. But he won’t owe anybody. What you see is what you get.”

Conversations with two dozen Sanders supporters revealed a lingering distrust of Clinton as too establishment-friendly, hawkish or untrustworthy. As some Sanders fans see it, the primary was not a simple preference for purity over pragmatism, but a moral choice between an honest figure and someone whom they consider fundamentally corrupted by the ways of Washington. Sanders has fed these perceptions throughout his campaign, which is one reason he’s having a hard time coming around to an endorsement.

Voters like Armes, who says she’ll “definitely” vote in November, highlight the difficulty Clinton faces in unifying her party. Clinton’s paltry support among Sanders voters could still grow, as his disheartened fans process the hard-fought primary campaign. But the Bloomberg poll found that only 5 percent of Sanders supporters who don’t currently back Clinton would consider doing so in the future. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

How dangerous is a gunless gunman?

“Why isn’t the assassination attempt on Donald Trump bigger news?,” asks Callum Borchers at the Washington Post.

The No. 1 trending question related to Donald Trump on Google right now is “Who tried to shoot Trump?” Which means a lot of people don’t know the answer. Which is probably because the assassination attempt on the presumptive Republican presidential nominee hasn’t been covered as a major news story.

The reason so many people wanted to know who tried to shoot Trump was because it was widely reported that a man did indeed try to shoot Trump.

The thing is, the young man in question — Michael Steven Sandford — didn’t actually try to shoot Trump.

By his own testimony, he certainly wanted to shoot Trump, but there’s a significant difference between wanting and trying.

For Sandford to try and shoot Trump he would have needed to possess a loaded gun — but he didn’t have one. What he actually tried to do was grab a police officer’s gun.

I know next to nothing about police training, but I’m confident that one of the basics in firearms use is on the need to retain control of ones own weapon. The officer in question seems to have passed that test.

The larger question here is not about the identity of the hapless would-be assassin but instead it is this: Why is it that Donald Trump and fellow gun rights supporters aren’t willing to demonstrate their confidence in the principles they claim they believe in, by speaking out in gun-permissive venues?

In other words, why wasn’t Sandford entitled to bring a gun to the rally?

The argument the gun lobby keeps on making is that people like Sandford, even if armed, would pose less threat if everyone else was also armed.

So why doesn’t Trump dispense with his Secret Service detail (which requires no one other than law enforcement officials can carry guns) and allow attendees to bring their own guns to his rallies? Of course, each would be required to produce a gun permit as they carry their handguns or assault rifles into the venue.

The more guns there are, the safer Trump should feel, right? Or maybe not…

Facebooktwittermail

Inside Donald Trump’s strategic decision to target Muslims

Jenna Johnson reports: Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric has ranged widely: He has long stoked the idea that Obama might be a secret follower of Islam. Two months before proposing the Muslim ban, Trump announced he would kick all Syrian refugees out of the country and bar any others from coming in because they could be a “Trojan horse.” Trump also suggested killing the innocent relatives of terrorists.

“I’ve had good instincts in life, and a lot of this is instinct,” Trump said, adding that three of his Republican primary rivals “confidentially” told him that they agreed with the ban but could not publicly endorse it.

By February — after losing the Iowa caucuses and winning the New Hampshire primary — Trump focused on the next contest in South Carolina. The night before the primary, he told an apocryphal tale that he would return to again and again about U.S. Gen. John J. Pershing fighting Muslim insurgents in the Philippines in the early 1900s.

“He took 50 men and he dipped 50 bullets in pigs’ blood,” Trump said. “And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said: ‘You go back to your people, and you tell them what happened.’ And for 25 years, there wasn’t a problem.”

Lewandowski said in an interview before his firing that the telling of the story was planned ahead of time. He said it doesn’t matter that it isn’t true. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Trump is wrong that Muslims don’t do our part — I reported Omar Mateen to the FBI

Mohammed A. Malik writes: Since Sept. 11, I’ve thought the only way to answer Islamophobia was to be polite and kind; the best way to counter all the negativity people were seeing on TV about Islam was by showing them the opposite. I urged Omar to volunteer and help people in need – Muslim or otherwise (charity is a pillar of Islam). He agreed, but was always very worked up about this injustice.

Then, during the summer of 2014, something traumatic happened for our community. A boy from our local mosque, Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, was 22 when he became the first American-born suicide bomber, driving a truck full of explosives into a government office in Syria. He’d traveled there and joined a group affiliated with al-Qaeda, the previous year. We had all known Moner; he was jovial and easygoing, the opposite of Omar. According to a posthumous video released that summer, he had clearly self-radicalized – and had also done so by listening to the lectures of Anwar al-Awlaki, the charismatic Yemen-based imam who helped radicalize several Muslims, including the Fort Hood shooter. Everyone in the area was shocked and upset. We hate violence and were horrified that one of our number could have killed so many. (After an earlier training mission to Syria, he’d tried to recruit a few Florida friends to the cause. They told the FBI about him.)

Immediately after Moner’s attack, news reports said that American officials didn’t know anything about him; I read that they were looking for people to give them some background. So I called the FBI and offered to tell investigators a bit about the young man. It wasn’t much – we hadn’t been close – but I’m an American Muslim, and I wanted to do my part. I didn’t want another act like that to happen. I didn’t want more innocent people to die. Agents asked me if there were any other local kids who might resort to violence in the name of Islam. No names sprang to mind.

After my talk with the FBI, I spoke to people in the Islamic community, including Omar, about Moner’s attack. I wondered how he could have radicalized. Both Omar and I attended the same mosque as Moner, and the imam never taught hate or radicalism. That’s when Omar told me he had been watching videos of Awlaki, too, which immediately raised red flags for me. He told me the videos were very powerful.

After speaking with Omar, I contacted the FBI again to let them know that Omar had been watching Awlaki’s tapes. He hadn’t committed any acts of violence and wasn’t planning any, as far as I knew. And I thought he probably wouldn’t, because he didn’t fit the profile: He already had a second wife and a son. But it was something agents should keep their eyes on. I never heard from them about Omar again, but apparently they did their job: They looked into him and, finding nothing to go on, they closed the file. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Donald Trump starts summer push with crippling money deficit

The New York Times reports: Donald J. Trump enters the general election campaign laboring under the worst financial and organizational disadvantage of any major party nominee in recent history, placing both his candidacy and his party in political peril.

Mr. Trump began June with just $1.3 million in cash on hand, a figure more typical for a campaign for the House of Representatives than the White House. He trailed Hillary Clinton, who raised more than $28 million in May, by more than $41 million, according to reports filed late Monday night with the Federal Election Commission.

He has a staff of around 70 people — compared with nearly 700 for Mrs. Clinton — suggesting only the barest effort toward preparing to contest swing states this fall. And he fired his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, on Monday, after concerns among allies and donors about his ability to run a competitive race.

The Trump campaign has not aired a television advertisement since he effectively secured the nomination in May and has not booked any advertising for the summer or fall. Mrs. Clinton and her allies spent nearly $26 million on advertising in June alone, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, pummeling Mr. Trump over his temperament, his statements and his mocking of a disabled reporter. The only sustained reply, aside from Mr. Trump’s gibes at rallies and on Twitter, has come from a pair of groups that spent less than $2 million combined. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Will Trump swallow the GOP whole?

Mark Leibovich writes: At this point in the pre-general-election calendar four and eight years ago, Romney and John McCain had built massive campaign operations and fund-raising networks that were orders of magnitude larger than Trump’s. They had accumulated armies of elected officials promoting them and were diligently making peace with vanquished opponents and paying courtesy calls to party dignitaries and congressional leaders in the name of “unity.” The period between the end of the primaries and the start of the conventions is typically one of consolidation, good-will harvesting and turning full attention to the general-election opponent — all of which Trump has succeeded in achieving the 180-degree opposite of.

Trump would of course be the first to point out that both McCain and Romney lost and that he has been doubted at every step of his campaign. But the degree to which he seems unconcerned with his pariah status among name Republicans remains a key feature of his pursuit. To a comical extent, top Republicans willed themselves invisible when I reached out to them for this article, fearing, not incorrectly, that the conversation would turn to Trump. This included some of the most typically quotable Republicans, including former Trump challengers like Graham (“He’s sorta had his fill talking about Trump,” a spokesman emailed), Perry (“Thanks for thinking of him”) and Ted Cruz (“Not great timing on our end”); the previous nominee Mitt Romney (“You are kind to think of me,” he wrote); Trump stalwarts like Chris Christie (“We are going to take a pass this time”); Trump-averse Republican governors like Charlie Baker of Massachusetts (“The governor won’t be available”); and senators like Mike Lee, of Utah (“Senator Lee would love to talk to you about the state of the G.O.P. and conservatism in general. We are free anytime after Nov 8.”).

I tried Rubio, who has undergone more public agony than perhaps anyone about Trump. Rubio looks nauseated whenever someone asks him about the man he called “the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency” but who later said he would be “honored” to speak for at the Republican convention before clarifying that if he did speak, he would only “speak about things I believe in, not somebody else’s platform.” Rubio also holds the astonishing position of saying he’ll vote for someone he has previously declared unfit to hold the American nuclear codes. You envision him under a mushroom cloud, assuring his kids that it could be even worse — at least he didn’t vote for Clinton. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

British man tried to take officer’s gun to kill Donald Trump at rally, police say

The Guardian reports: A British man has been detained and charged with attempting to seize a police officer’s gun at a Las Vegas rally in order to commit an act of violence against Donald Trump, authorities said on Monday.

Michael Steven Sandford was arrested at the Saturday rally after grabbing at the holster and handle of a gun at the hip of a Las Vegas police officer who was providing security at the event for the presumptive Republican nominee.

A federal magistrate on Monday found that Sandford was “a danger to the community and a risk of non-appearance” and ordered that he be held without bail, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Justice, who also confirmed that Sandford is a British citizen.

A spokesperson for Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office said: “We are providing assistance following the arrest of a British national in Las Vegas.” British authorities are understood to have become involved on Sunday. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The U.S. and Russia — jogging in tandem on a nuclear treadmill

Jeffrey Lewis writes: A few years back, I gave [John] Harvey [former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense Programs] — who is, to be fair, really a pretty decent guy and one of the few people genuinely willing to work on a nonpartisan basis for any administration — a hard time about one of the slides in a PowerPoint presentation he had developed to justify a replacement nuclear warhead. I removed all the words from it, leaving just the two images he had used as illustration — one representing “legacy” warheads in a burnt orange that faintly evoked rust, another representing a replacement warhead as nice and shiny. One might even say it looked tippy-top [as Donald Trump believes nuclear weapons should indeed look]. The words on the slide weren’t the real message.

Too often the question left unasked in our finely tuned analyses of nuclear quality and nuclear superiority is: So what? Why would deterrence require that weapons be tippy-top [as most so-called nuclear weapons experts seem to think they need to be]? Would it matter if you were incinerated with a new shiny warhead rather than an old rusty one? These comparisons are ultimately appeals to emotion, not logic. And those appeals work only if we accept the metaphor that the nuclear dilemma is a race and our only escape is to cross the finish line first. But what if [Paul] Warnke had it right [in “Apes on a Treadmill“]? What if there is no finish line other than nuclear catastrophe and that the United States and Russia are jogging in tandem on a treadmill? What do we do then?

Warnke had an answer to that. “We can be first off the treadmill,” he wrote. “That’s the only victory the arms race has to offer.” [But instead of actually pursuing that victory and in spite of his dreams for a nuclear weapons-free world, President Obama has authorized a trillion dollar upgrade.] [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

For Muslims like me, Trump’s words are toxic

Bim Adewunmi, a journalist from the UK now living in America, writes: I am Other, and the worlds I know most intimately are becoming increasingly uncomfortable, but I still have the luxury of the option of packing my bags and returning to the also-troubled land from whence I came (London, for the obtuse). I think about that option when I see Americans say that they are not going to vote, either in protest at what they call a rigged process, or more worryingly, because Trump is “what we deserve”, a slap in the face to shock America into a corrective overhaul of its cultures and systems.

Here’s what I think: His usefulness as the most “necessary” jolt back to common sense is severely limited and/or massively overrated. To be “sitting this election out” reeks of a repugnant sort of privilege. The damage that life under would-be President Trump would introduce does not lie in the not-too-distant Future; it is in the Right Now, under Presumptive Presidential Candidate Trump.

It is the noxious idea of a fictitious Great American past, which allows citizens to incite hatred and fear, and stoke it to such a tempo that it leaves those most at risk in a state of constant terror. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Trump has ripped the mask off the GOP pretense on racism

Sasha Abramsky writes: eight years after Obama’s extraordinary electoral victory, Donald Trump is stoking a racial violence, a seething, bubbling, street-violent animus last whipped up so overtly by a presidential candidate in 1968, by the segregationist George Wallace.

Trump has repeatedly re-tweeted, thus endorsing, White Supremacist tweets, launched a vicious verbal assault on Mexican-Americans, made sweeping anti-Muslim statements that, if one were to substitute “Jew” for “Muslim,” would not have been out of place in early Nazi propaganda, and has, in the process, racked up endorsements from a who’s who of white nationalists and neo-fascist groups.

It’s not that that animus hasn’t long been there; it’s just that, since the civil rights era, politicians have calculated that subtlety wins out over naked bigotry, that it’s somehow more palatable to the great mass of middle-of-the-road voters. Hence the rise of what came to be described as “dog whistle politics,” a coded appeal to racial hatreds that could be heard and clearly understood by those it was aimed at while being plausibly denied when politicians were publicly called out for it.

Neither party can claim to have been immune to this. On the Democratic side, Bill Clinton, for example, despite his great popularity amongst African American voters and his reputation as a post-segregationist, liberal Southern governor, sought to shore up his conservative credentials with tough-on-crime policies and welfare reforms that disproportionately impacted black Americans.

But, by and large, once the national Democratic Party broke with its southern segregationist wing and embraced Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights agenda in the mid-1960s, it was the GOP, employing what Richard Nixon termed “the Southern Strategy,” that utilized race-resentment politics in the crudest, most personal, of ways. After all, millions of white Americans were largely unreconciled to the civil rights revolution, and for a party willing to pander to their bigotries, there were rich electoral pickings to be had. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Trump’s baseless assimilation claim about Muslims in America

Dr. Ferhan Asghar at a Muslim center in West Chester, Ohio, with his wife, Pakeeza, and daughters Zara, left, and Emaan.

Dr. Ferhan Asghar at a Muslim center in West Chester, Ohio, with his wife, Pakeeza, and daughters Zara, left, and Emaan.

FactCheck.org reports: Donald Trump made a baseless claim that assimilation among Muslim immigrants in the U.S. is “pretty close” to “nonexistent.” Trump offered no support for his claim, but the Pew Research Center, which conducted detailed surveys in 2011, concluded that “Muslim Americans appear to be highly assimilated into American society.”
Scholars on Islam that we spoke to also dismissed Trump’s claim as “bizarre,” absurd” and inconsistent with their observations of a Muslim community that they say is — for the most part — well integrated into American culture and identity.

Let’s dig into the highlights of some of Pew’s specific findings:

  • Muslims are more likely than other immigrants to become U.S. citizens. Four out of five Muslim Americans are U.S. citizens, including 70 percent of those born outside the U.S. That is a much higher rate than the broader immigrant population in the U.S., as 47 percent of all foreign-born are citizens.
  • Nearly three-quarters of Muslim Americans (74 percent) believe that “[m]ost people can get ahead if they are willing to work hard.” That rate of optimism is higher than the general public, 62 percent.
  • A roughly similar percentage of Muslims and Christians in the U.S. say they think of themselves first as either Muslim (49 percent) or Christian (46 percent). Among white evangelicals, 70 percent said they identify first as Christian. A higher percentage of Christians as a whole say they identify as Americans first, 46 percent, compared with 26 percent among Muslim Americans. But Muslim Americans were more likely (18 percent versus 6 percent) to say they considered themselves Muslim and American equally.
  • A majority of Muslim Americans (56 percent) responded that most Muslims who come to the U.S. want to adopt American customs and ways of life, while 20 percent said those Muslim immigrants want to be distinct from the larger American society (16 percent said they wanted to do both).
  • About half of Muslim Americans say that only some or hardly any of their close friends are Muslims, while half say most or all of their close friends are Muslims.
  • More than six in 10 Muslim Americans see no conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society, almost identical to the rates among U.S. Christians.
  • Half of Muslim immigrants say they display the American flag at home, at the office or on the car, and 33 percent of native-born Muslims reported doing so as well. Overall, displaying the American flag is less common among Muslim Americans (44 percent) than among the population as a whole (59 percent).

[Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Trump thinks Muslims don’t ‘assimilate.’ He should have met my grandfather

Huda Al-Marashi writes: My Iraqi immigrant grandfather used to have a small novelty shop where he sold hair accessories, lipstick-shaped erasers and noisy, battery-operated toys. He soon learned enough English phrases to complete a business transaction. All other communication he handled with gestures and the warmest smile.

During his many hospital stays in the last years of his life, his nurses would always tell me he was their favorite patient. They’d pat his hand and say he was just the sweetest. They understood this about a man who said no more to them than “How are you” and “Thank you.”

Last week, Sean Hannity posed a question to Donald Trump about how to vet the hearts of Muslims coming to the United States. Trump replied: “Assimilation has been very hard. It’s almost, I won’t say nonexistent, but it gets to be pretty close. And I’m talking about second and third generation — for some reason there’s no real assimilation.” (Maybe this explains Trump’s support for profiling Muslim, which, on Sunday, he called “common sense.”)

Assimilation is a contentious concept among those who study immigration. (How does one measure assimilation, especially when most of the qualities associated with being assimilated have more to do with assuming aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture than with actual social integration?) Sociological considerations aside, the suggestion that Muslims in the United States have not assimilated is simply not correct. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The Trump campaign is becoming an outright catastrophe

trump-bw

Paul Waldman writes: While he could manage a stunning turnaround, at the moment Trump seems to have put together one of the worst presidential campaigns in history. Let’s take a look at all the major disadvantages Trump faces as we head toward the conventions:

A skeletal campaign staff. Trump succeeded in the primaries with a small staff whose job was to do little more than stage rallies. But running a national campaign is hugely more complex than barnstorming from one state to the next during primaries. While the Clinton campaign has built an infrastructure of hundreds of operatives performing the variety of tasks a modern presidential campaign requires, the Trump campaign “estimates it currently has about 30 paid staff on the ground across the country,” a comically small number.

Not enough money, and little inclination to raise it. Trump hasn’t raised much money yet, and he doesn’t seem inclined to do so; according to one report, after telling Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus that he’d call 20 large donors to make a pitch, he gave up after three. Fundraising is the least pleasant part of running for office, but unlike most candidates who suck it up and do what they have to, Trump may not be willing to spend the time dialing for dollars. Instead, he’s convinced that he can duplicate what he did in the primaries and run a low-budget campaign based on having rallies and doing TV interviews. As he told NBC’s Hallie Jackson, “I don’t think I need that money, frankly. I mean, look what we’re doing right now. This is like a commercial, right, except it’s tougher than a normal commercial.” It’s not like a commercial, because in interviews Trump gets challenged, and usually says something that makes him look foolish or dangerous. But he seems convinced that his ability to get limitless media coverage, no matter how critical that coverage is, will translate to an increase in support.

Outgunned on the airwaves. As a result, Democrats are pouring money into television ads attacking Trump and promoting Clinton with no answer from the other side. As Mark Murray reported yesterday, “So far in June, Clinton and the outside groups backing her have spent a total of $23.3 million on ads in the battleground states of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia.” And how much have Trump and his allies spent on ads in those states? Zero. Nothing. Nada. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Former staffers describe Trump as a ‘germophobic’ ‘narcissist’ who is ‘obsessed with menstruation’

Seth Stevenson writes: We know about Donald Trump’s on-camera persona as the star of The Apprentice: his tyrannical management style, his gruff demeanor, his terse catchphrase. But what was Trump like between takes, when the cameras were off but the crew was watching?

Slate reached out to find people who’d worked on The Apprentice during Trump’s tenure. Most people we contacted declined to talk, citing nondisclosure agreements they’d signed as a condition of their employment on the show. But three were willing to speak — as long as we didn’t use their names. And one spoke to us on the record.

What do they recall about Trump’s on-set behavior? It’s a lot like his campaign behavior. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. officials say American Muslims repeatedly report extremist threats

Reuters reports: Muslim-Americans have repeatedly informed authorities of fellow Muslims they fear might be turning to extremism, law enforcement officials say, contrary to a claim by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump this week.

“They don’t report them,” Trump said in a CNN interview on Monday, in the wake of the mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub of 49 people by an American Muslim who claimed allegiance to Islamic State. “For some reason, the Muslim community does not report people like this.”

But FBI director James Comey said, “They do not want people committing violence, either in their community or in the name of their faith, and so some of our most productive relationships are with people who see things and tell us things who happen to be Muslim.

“It’s at the heart of the FBI’s effectiveness to have good relationships with these folks,” Comey said at a press conference following the Orlando shootings. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

What Obama actually thinks about radical Islam

Jeffrey Goldberg writes: It is not a new practice for critics of President Obama to question his commitment to the fight against Islamist terrorism, but Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has cast doubt on Obama’s commitment to this struggle in uniquely florid and bizarre ways. On Tuesday, he claimed that Obama “prioritizes” America’s enemies over the American people; on Monday, he insinuated that Obama is sympathetic to the Islamic State terror group. (Read the previous sentence again and ask yourself: How has it come to this?)

Trump’s recent statements about Obama grow from a neurotic belief in the president’s malevolent otherness: On ISIS, Trump said, Obama “doesn’t get it, or he gets it better than anybody understands.” Barack Obama, to Donald Trump, is, and will forever be, the Manchurian President — Manchuria, by way of Kenya, with a detour in Raqqa.

It is true that Trump’s critique of Obama’s handling of terrorism is, among other things, analysis-free and comprehensively unserious, but it is also true is that there are non-hysterical critiques to be made, and not only critiques that concern Obama’s reluctance to describe the threat as one posed by “radical Islam” (a reluctance the president addressed on Tuesday). Critics to Obama’s right fault him for prematurely withdrawing American troops from Iraq, and for not doing enough to prevent Syria from becoming a safe haven for ISIS. His reluctance to involve the U.S. more systematically in the Syrian civil war, the argument goes, has allowed jihadists to fill the vacuum created by the absence of the world’s sole superpower. Some critics on the right also argue that Obama blanches when confronted by the ugly truth about Muslim dysfunction and extremism; political correctness, in this view, hamstrings the president, and makes him obtuse. Critics to Obama’s left, on the other hand, argue that he is killing too many people, particularly through the use of drone strikes, and that his policies are distressingly of a piece with those of his Republican predecessor. The over-militarization of the so-called war on terror, that argument goes, exacerbates a problem that has already been hyped by “Islamophobic” fearmongers. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail