Clinton speaks to reporters in White Plains, N.Y., September 8, 2016. (Reuters photo: Brian Snyder)

They’re weak on national security, so they make the only play they can: demonizing Donald Trump.

On Saturday night, a Muslim terrorist stabbed nine people in a Minnesota shopping mall before being shot dead by an off-duty cop. Around the same time, another Muslim terrorist’s bomb exploded in Manhattan, wounding 29 people, one critically. That suspect, Ahmad Khan Rahami, reportedly planted a second unexploded bomb in the area, as well as a backpack filled with IEDs in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Earlier in the morning, another bomb he is alleged to have built exploded along the route of a military charity race in New Jersey.


All in all, Muslim terrorists had a busy Saturday.

Naturally, the media rushed to target the real danger to Americans: Donald Trump. Half an hour after the Chelsea bombing, Trump stated, in typically vague militaristic language, that a bomb had gone off in New York City, and that America needed to get “very tough.” This prompted apoplexy from members of the media, who deemed it unthinkable that Trump could label the incident a “bombing” without full confirmation. Hillary Clinton, too, attempted to scold Trump for his premature articulation: “It’s important to know the facts about any incidents like this. I think it’s always wiser to wait until you have information before making conclusions.” Of course, Clinton and her media allies conveniently ignored the fact that Trump turned out to be right.

And that was only their first line of attack.


Next came the inevitable attempts to paint Trump as the source of the attacks. Clinton led the way, stating that ISIS “are looking to make this into a war against Islam, rather than a war against jihadists, violent terrorists. The kinds of rhetoric and language Mr. Trump has used is giving aid and comfort to our adversaries.” (The language “aid and comfort,” as Clinton knows, refers to actual treason, punishable by death.) She also called Trump a “recruiting sergeant” for ISIS, repeating a line she’s been using since April. The media had no fact-checkers readily available to determine whether Trump has been filling out the forms at the local ISIS recruitment center, though they were willing to flood the field when Trump said that Hillary and Obama had created ISIS.


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The Obama White House, meanwhile, declared that the real threat to America came not from terrorists attempting to maim and kill American citizens, but from the prospective loss of the “narrative” war. “When it comes to ISIL, we are in a fight, a narrative fight with them, a narrative battle,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest explained. “And what ISIL wants to do is they want to project that they are an organization that is representing Islam in a fight and a war against the West, and a war against the United States. . . . We can’t play into this narrative.” He then blamed Trump for helping ISIS’s cause in this narrative war — although those stabbed in Minnesota and wounded in New York might argue that they weren’t harmed by a sharp metal narrative.

Nobody in their right mind fears Donald Trump’s rhetoric generating terrorism more than ISIS’s setting kettle bombs in trash cans.

What’s the strategy here? The same strategy Democrats have rolled out since the end of World War II: attempting to demonize Republicans as the true threat to the republic, a greater threat even than foreign adversaries. During the Cold War, Democrats routinely pilloried Republicans as the real risk to American freedoms — LBJ suggested that Barry Goldwater would usher in an age of nuclear war, and Jimmy Carter argued Ronald Reagan would do the same. For two generations, the Left argued that militant conservative anti-Communists were a greater danger to Americans than Communists. Conservatives, meanwhile, argued that the greatest danger to America lay in the Soviet Union.


In the post–Cold War era, liberals have continued to argue that conservatives pose a threat to freedom and peace. Republicans, they say, are the true enemy: They want to take away your free stuff and your sexual freedom, reverse the racial progress we’ve made. On foreign policy, the Left’s true area of political vulnerability, progressives make the same argument with regard to ISIS they once made with regard to the Soviet Union: We have little to worry about from ISIS per se — after all, they’re not an “existential” threat to the United States — but we do have to worry that right-wing rhetoric will turn the entire Muslim world against us, provoking World War III. Donald Trump supposedly represents the tip of that spear. He will lose us the narrative war.


RELATED: The Response to This Weekend’s Terror Attacks Showed Willful Blindness in Real Time

Meanwhile, Trump argues that gormless leftism cripples the West in its fight against Islamic terrorism, and voters buy it. It’s difficult for Americans to stomach talk of the dangers of right-wing Islamophobia when one Muslim terrorist attack after another dominates the news. Nobody in their right mind fears Donald Trump’s rhetoric generating terrorism more than ISIS’s setting kettle bombs in trash cans. Trump isn’t as scary as ISIS, no matter how much effort the media and Hillary Clinton put into persuading us he is.

That’s why Trump seems to benefit in the court of public opinion in the wake of terrorist attacks. The Democratic argument that Trump is the Scariest Man in the World only works in a universe where ISIS isn’t scary. And that means downplaying the threat ISIS poses, pretending that all is well when it plainly isn’t.


#related#Given that it isn’t — given that Islamic terrorism is a real threat to American citizens — the Left is far more dangerous than the Right. Progressives pursue policies that guarantee an increase in terrorism: unfettered immigration from unvettable areas, onerous restrictions on legal use of law-enforcement resources to pursue leads, public shaming rituals against citizens who have the temerity to report the suspicious activities of Muslims. Without them, ISIS simply could not have succeeded as it has over the past several years.

Americans know that, too, so the Left’s attack on Trump is bound to fail in this case. But that won’t stop them from trying. After all, they only have one play, and they’ll keep running it until the clock runs out.

— Ben Shapiro is the editor-in-chief of the DailyWire.com.