Trump: Will he Fake Terror?

Trump is a man so reckless, so petulant, so full of blind self-regard, it is impossible to know where his presidency will lead. Will he fake terror? Will he go to war to distract us? The unthinkable is now thinkable. That itself is stomach-turning.

From Vladimir Putin to Saddam Hussein, Trump has expressed his admiration for a rogues’ gallery of foreign dictators and autocrats. And we know that other “strongman” leaders he admires have gone to war just for the ratings, or to distract from their miserable failures and corruption.

“When our sitting president and his national security adviser speak of fighting terrorism alongside Russia, what they are proposing to the American people is terror management: the exploitation of real, dubious, and simulated terror attacks to bring down democracy. The Russian recap of the first telephone call between the president and Vladimir Putin is telling: the two men ‘shared the opinion that it is necessary to join forces against the common enemy number one: international terrorism and extremism.’ ” So writes Timothy Snyder in this article adapted from On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.…

READ THE REST HERE