As the world grieves over the butchery in London, President Donald Trump is at it again: he’s in angry Twitter war lashing out at the Mayor of London. Why? I think John Avlon, Editor-in-Chief and Managing Director of The Daily Beast, has it right. It really isn’t over terrorism.
As Avlon, a CNN contributor, points out, London’s mayor happens to be a Muslim. By now, it’s familiar. Trump, one of the most negative Presidents in American history who is proving to be President of His Base, by His Base and For His base, started blasting London’s mayor with far more sincerity and frequency than his expressions of grief for the people who lost their lives to the terrorist attacks there Saturday, or their families. Those expressions seemed pro forma. His attacks on the mayor have been emphatic. The New York Times summarizes the latest embarrassment to the United States and the once-center-of-thoughtfulness Oval Office here:
President Trump and his team renewed a trans-Atlantic feud with the mayor of London on Sunday, portraying him as soft on terrorism a day after seven people were killed and dozens more wounded in the latest attack in the British capital.
Mr. Trump assailed Mayor Sadiq Khan by mischaracterizing his comments following the attack. After condemning the “cowardly terrorists,” Mr. Khan told Londoners not “to be alarmed” by seeing more police officers on the streets. Mr. Trump presented it as if Mr. Khan had meant they should not be alarmed by terrorism. The mayor’s office fired back, calling Mr. Trump “ill informed.”
The highly charged exchange as Britain grappled once again with the threat of terrorism at home reflected the tensions between Mr. Trump and America’s traditional allies in Europe. Mr. Trump returned home a little more than a week ago after meetings in Belgium and Italy that put on display disputes over trade and the role of NATO, then followed up by pulling the United States out of the Paris climate change accord, over the objections of European leaders.
The friction has been especially acute for more than a year between Mr. Trump and Mr. Khan, the first Muslim to serve as mayor of a major Western European capital. During last year’s presidential contest, Mr. Khan criticized Mr. Trump’s proposal to temporarily ban all Muslims from entering the United States and endorsed Hillary Clinton, prompting an exchange with Mr. Trump’s campaign. Mr. Trump’s son Donald Jr. criticized Mr. Khan as recently as March.
The president’s initial reaction to the Saturday night attack in London was to offer traditional messages of support and solidarity. By Sunday morning, however, he trained his scorn on Mr. Khan.
But Khan isn’t taking Trump’s bait. Showing — like so many thoughtful, serious, policy-oriented politicians here and heads of state in Europe — that he won’t descend to Trumpian level:
“The mayor is busy working with the police, emergency services and the government to coordinate the response to this horrific and cowardly terrorist attack and provide leadership and reassurance to Londoners and visitors to our city,” Khan’s spokesperson said in a statement. “He has more important things to do than respond to Donald Trump’s ill-informed tweet that deliberately takes out of context his remarks urging Londoners not to be alarmed when they saw more police – including armed officers – on the streets.”
The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin (a Republican, although Trumpistas hate her for not jumping on the the gold-plated bandwagon) is aghast.
The stoic determination and decency of the British people and their leaders were on full display in the hours after the latest horrific terrorist rampage. The Brits fought back, launching drinking glasses and chairs at the savages who attacked them. The police acted with lightning-fast precision, killing the three assailants within eight minutes of the emergency call. And, God Bless him, a man returned to the bar where he experienced Saturday’s horror — to pay his bill and tip. Civilization is not going to be driven out of Britain by three or three hundred killers.
Meanwhile — and it pains me to write this — our president acted like a clod, a heartless and dull-witted thug in sending out a series of tweets. He — commander in chief and leader of the Free World — first retweeted an unverified, unofficial Drudge headline about the unfolding terrorist attack. Then he aimed to bolster his Muslim travel ban (which is not supposed to be a Muslim travel ban). “We need to be smart, vigilant and tough,” he tweeted. “We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!” (Aside from the inappropriateness of President Trump’s tweet, he fails to grasp that the courts in these cases are reaffirming our rights against an overreaching, discriminatory edict.)
But Avlon, who is also a contributor to CNN, nails it (again):
Here is the offending statement from the Mayor of London: “Londoners will see an increased police presence today and over the course of the next few days. There’s no reason to be alarmed.”
This seems utterly unobjectionable. Expressions of increased vigilance and the resolve to live free from fear are what leaders do when confronted with domestic terror, following a model set by Winston Churchill during the Battle of Britain: Keep Calm and Carry On.
So why would the mayor of London be singled out for a Trump twitter attack while his city prepares to bury the dead? It seems petty, cruel, and stupid—blaming the victim and undercutting our allies in a moment of maximum pain and peril.
The answer can’t be politics. It’s unlikely that Donald Trump has deep feelings about the Conservative versus Labour versus Lib-Dem contest, though he should know that America’s closest ally is 5 days away from a general election.
Donald Trump’s dislike of Mayor Khan can’t even be credibly described as personal. He’s never met the man.
The fact that the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is Muslim just might help explain the President’s animus. Dig a little deeper and you can see not only the baseless accusation of weak leadership but also intimation of divided loyalty. This is fear-fueled xenophobia dressed up as tough-minded real talk.
He concludes:
That the presence of a Muslim mayor has not inoculated London against terror attacks is not at all surprising. Terrorists target civilians for reasons unrelated to who is running our respective governments – which is why mushy minded, ‘let’s talk it all out’ responses are naïve. Terrorists are threatened by freedom, democracy and diversity and that is why we must unflinchingly fight them to the death, when necessary.
But feeding into broad narratives about Islam versus the West makes our job of winning this long war much harder. Unintentionally echoing terrorist talking points about an irredeemable clash of civilizations ends up perpetuating the illusion of moral equivalence terrorists push to new recruits.
Mayor Khan represents an example of equal opportunity based in individual achievement that terrorist propaganda can’t easily dismiss. The “us against them” script is harder to impose on society. Unfortunately, our president is drawn to divisive comments that debase the office. Attacking the mayor of a suffering city is just the latest example of President Trump alienating our allies while emboldening our enemies.
Trump continues to decimate norms about how to behave in office, not just domestically, but on the world stage. CNN’s Chris Cilliza notes that he has changed — for the worst — the idea of what being “Presidential” is:
Trump’s responses are the latest example of how he is radically altering the idea of what it means to be “presidential.” During the 2016 campaign, Trump’s attacks on John McCain’s war hero status, his savaging of a Gold Star family, his wild exaggerations about his wealth and his seeming disinterest in the truth were all taken, at one point or another, as signs that he simply wasn’t “presidential” enough to actually win anything. That, while voters liked his unorthodox style, they would eventually tire of him as they looked for the sort of statesman who had traditionally held the nation’s top political job.
It didn’t happen. And Trump has never stopped. His quintet of tweets on London are not only something that no previous American president would ever have said, they’re also statements that it’s hard to imagine any other leader in any other democracy around the world saying.
They are more the statements of a conservative talk radio show host than they are of what we have come to think of as a president — bombastic, over the top and out of context. They are, by traditional standards, anti-presidential.
Which, come to think of it, is a good way to describe Trump. He is sort of an anti-president — at least in terms of how we have always defined those terms. Trump’s attitude and approach in office is closer to Jerry Springer than to Gerald Ford. He’s more Limbaugh than Lincoln.
What we know: Trump isn’t going to stop Trumping. The only question now is whether voters want an anti-president as their president.
Meanwhile, Americans need to keep in mind these questions:
Exactly what do we expect from Trump when (as is likely) there’s a terrorist attack on America soil?
What powers till Trump seek to use?
What expansions of executive power will he demand?
How much bipartisan scrutiny would that receive?
And if it entails more breaking of our societal and political norms, will be pushback? Or would pushback within that context be too late?
UPDATE: 2: Well, well, waddaya know…
Photo: by US Embassy London – https://www.flickr.com/photos/usembassylondon/30885068755/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53009177
NOTE: Due to a technical glitch the first few sentences of the post were cut off. It’s now fixed.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.