Are You Safer Now Than You Were Four Years Ago?
“Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” This is the famous question posed to incumbent presidents past and future alike. For the section of the country on the Trump train, the answer seems to be a resounding yes.
Reality offers a much starker analysis. Today’s bombshell report that the CIA was pulling its’ top intelligence asset from Russia due to security concerns regarding the president shows a fundamental lack of faith in Trump’s leadership by our national security. This isn’t the first of Trump’s many failures, but it provides a perfect portrait of just how much damage Trump has done to national security during the last three years.
When it comes to international relations, Donald Trump is a man who is desperate for a deal. It doesn’t matter what kind of deal, as long as Trump can portray himself as a man of action. We learned just how desperate he was for deals when he announced that he canceled a meeting with the Taliban at Camp David. The president was going to host The Taliban on American soil the week of 9/11. That is bad optics alone, but it shows that the president is desperate to leave Afghanistan with no real strategy or plan for meeting our security goals in the region. Americans are weary of the War in Afghanistan, but I doubt they want to leave Afghanistan without assurances we won’t be subject to another 9/11,which the Taliban was celebrating as recently as July.
This same lack of strategic focus is most apparent when it comes to Trump’s sickening fawning over North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un. Under Trump’s leadership, North Korea was able to gain international legitimization with a historic summit, have the photo op of Trump becoming the first president to step onto North Korean soil, and the backing of a major world power as it continues to become a larger part of the world stage. Meanwhile, the US has not gained a single security concession as the North Koreans continue their missile and nuclear development, human rights are continually violated, and belligerence within the Korean peninsula continues.
Meanwhile, with North Korea’s biggest ally, China, we are currently engaged in a trade war that is costing the American household hundreds of dollars. Trump claims the Chinese are bearing the economic cost of the trade war, but this is a self evident lie, as domestic consumers always pay for the cost of tariffs. It’s a fundamental economic principle. The lack of strategic focus or long term economic goals in the trade war means that Presidents Trump and Xi are playing a game of brinkmanship until one side caves. President Xi, a man of ruthless focus, is content to wait out the Trump Administration. This means that subsequent presidents’ will have to decide whether to continue Trump’s war and force American citizens to bear the cost, or negotiate the terms of engagement, and hand our biggest geopolitical rival easy leverage due to Trump’s lack of foresight.
This brings us back to Trump’s largest national security blind spot, his unhealthy aversion to Russian interference. The Russians indisputably attacked the 2016 election with the intention of helping President Trump get elected, and he is clearly very sore on the subject of his legitimacy. As a result, he has failed to bolster our election security ahead of 2020. Reprehensibly, Trump is more likely to side with Putin and Russian intelligence over American intelligence officers, most notably in the infamous Helsinki summit. In other words, one of our biggest geopolitical rivals is undermining our system of government, not to mention our security interests, and instead of taking proper measures to stand up to the Russians, Trump is too busy cozying up to a thug like Vladimir Putin.
Now, none of these challenges are insurmountable, especially with our allies. Of course, that assumes Trump isn’t antagonizing our friends like Canada, questioning our commitment to military alliances like NATO, or pulling us out of strategic partnerships like the TPP or Paris Climate accords, which would have put pressure on our foes, especially China. Trump has managed to take decades old alliances with no serious issues and turn them into international incidents, such as when a trip to Denmark was cancelled because they wouldn’t sell Greenland to the USA.
It’s not just our security from foreign threats Trump has threatened, it’s domestic security as well. Trump has single-handedly turned border security into a political and cultural ground zero, inexorably tied to race and isolationism. Our border camps have become inhospitable, and a serious humanitarian crisis. Getting border funding, taking care of migrants, and enforcing our national borders has become so culturally toxic as to be near undo-able. As a result, our borders’ long term security is in more jeopardy than ever. Moreover, Trump has also given license to a rise in white nationalist related crime, most recently in the mass shootings in El Paso, where many of the statements in the shooter’s manifesto have been explicitly stated by Trump and his supporters.
Trump’s combative tone has also exacerbated the partisan divide in the country to unprecedented levels. The amount of toxicity on social media, in the mainstream news, and out of the mouth of the precedent has done more to divide American against American than any time since the Civil Rights era. Trump explicitly tells his fans that liberals hate America, tells freshman senators to go back where they came from, mocks civil rights legends for getting robbed, and spends more time on Twitter being a fourth-rate troll than he does actually accomplishing significant legislation. The result is an agitated domestic environment where there are fewer nationally unifying norms than ever.
Perhaps nothing is more dangerous than Trump’s continued assault on the Media and journalists at large. Every day comes with a new volley of Trump’s attempts to delegitimize any news story that is unfavorable of him, even when clearly caught in a lie. The most prominent example is Trump’s lying about using campaign finances to cover up an affair with Stormy Daniels while his wife was pregnant. This torrent of alternative facts and cover-ups has created a national environment where the citizens have diminishing faith in journalism, and are inclined to be distrustful of their neighbors based solely on what news they listen to: the president’s supporters at Fox and Breitbart, or everyone else. Moreover, Journalists have been the subject of mass shootings that were at least partially inspired by Trump’s rhetoric. Most deplorably, Donald Trump did absolutely nothing when Saudi Arabia murdered and dismembered American journalist Jamal Khashoggi, signalling that Trump is not going to retaliate to attacks on American citizens.
I want everyone reading this to ask: Do you feel more or less trusting of your government since 2016? What of other institutions like the press? What about your neighbors? The answer is self evident. Everyone has decried the erosion of national norms, of the lack of common decency, at the inability to talk to their neighbors during the Trump Era. It’s a culture of mistrust and fear that our country is currently experiencing, where the need to be combative and hyper aware of the political process comes from an intrinsic lack of trust in our leadership to not do something drastic. We’re not used to this as a country, and a national fatigue from the daily chaos is clearly on setting. When we can’t focus on what’s important because the disinformation is nonstop, everyone is less safe.
The most fundamental job of any government, whether it be a monarchy or a democracy, is to keep the citizens safe. Through his actions and rhetoric, Donald Trump has made the United States less safe than it was in the preceding era. Having failed in his most fundamental duty as president, the only choice left is to elect someone who will actually look out for American interests and security abroad, rather than pay lip service to American Interests while actively working to undermine them. The Trump Era won’t last forever, and America needs to prepare to secure itself once more.
Christian Thrailkill is a graduate of Southern Methodist University, musician, and columnist. He lives in Dallas, Texas.
