Zach Gibson/Pool/Getty Images Fourth Estate Trump and Terror We now know how the president will react to a domestic terrorist attack. It ain’t pretty.

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

From the day Donald Trump set his eyes on the presidency, I wondered how he would conduct himself from the Oval Office after a terrorist attack. Now I’ve got my answer. Just as he did during the campaign, he’s holding other politicians responsible for the attack.

Following the June 2016 Orlando massacre, Trump immediately affixed blame on President Barack Obama. “Truly, our president doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s failed us, and he’s failed us badly. And under his leadership, this situation will not get any better, it will only get worse,” he said. Trump also held former secretary of state Hillary Clinton responsible for the deaths. “The burden is on Hillary Clinton to tell us why she believes that immigration from these dangerous countries should be increased without any effective system … to screen.”


On Wednesday morning, Trump had his chance to tell the nation how he would work to make it safer. Instead, he returned to form by making the senior Democratic senator from New York his scapegoat after the terrorist truck attack in Manhattan that killed eight and injured 11. “The terrorist came into our country through what is called the ‘Diversity Visa Lottery Program,’ a Chuck Schumer beauty. I want merit based,” Trump tweeted. He whacked Schumer a few minutes later with another tweet: “‘Senator Chuck Schumer helping to import Europes problems’ said Col.Tony Shaffer. We will stop this craziness!”

Trump’s tweets reveal him not to be the modern colossus of power that he pictures himself to be, but a sniveling, unimaginative, finger-pointer looking for the cheapest way to score political points using the blood of the victims.

Nothing, as we’ve learned, is ever President Trump’s fault. No bucks stop at his desk, nor do dimes or nickels or pennies. Botched military operation in Niger or Yemen? Those belong to “his generals.” The failure of his legislative agenda? He places the onus on Congress. His fumbling presidency? That’s due to the “bad hand” he says he was dealt. The failure to repeal Obamacare, the debt-ceiling “mess,” and the travel ban fiasco? All somebody else’s lapse.

Trump’s reaction to the Manhattan killings is only more of the same blame-shifting. I’m no fan of Chuck Schumer, the greatest buttinsky in a town teeming with them, but in laying the killings at the senator’s door, Trump outdoes himself. The Diversity Visa Lottery, which Trump wants terminated, was signed in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush after passing both chambers overwhelmingly. If he wants to collect Schumer’s scalp for helping the law through Congress (as a member of the House at the time), justice requires him to drive to Houston and gather old man Bush’s, too.

Trump won’t do any such thing, though, because he’s a craven bully who doesn’t want to run anything but his big mouth. After the San Bernardino terror attack in December 2015, he promised to rip the skies apart with his fury to pour down hell on terrorists if such a rampage happened while he was president. His plans were so ferocious that he was reluctant to share them. “You don’t want to hear how I’d handle it,” Trump said, all but producing torture gear from a black bag to demonstrate. “I would get myself in so much trouble with them, we are going to handle it so tough.”

During the campaign, Trump also promised to keep the Guantánamo Bay prison open, and to “load it up with some bad dudes, believe me, we’re going to load it up.” Today, when asked by a reporter if the suspect in the Manhattan killings, Sayfullo Saipov, should be sent to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo, Trump returned to campaign form by responding, “Yes, send him to Gitmo.” As pledges go, it’s very Trumpian: According to legal scholars, it would be “unprecedented” for the president to send a U.S. permanent resident to Gitmo.

Less imaginative than his ideologue pal Steve Bannon, Trump can’t bring any vitality to topics beyond the primal ones of safety, fear and retaliation. His limited script, which served him in the campaign, is defined by the parameters marked by bluster and bombast. Today, he didn’t address the Manhattan attack in the words of inspiration and defiance of terrorism. Instead, he barked his usual campaign denunciations about obstruction from the “politically correct,” about the need to “get much smarter” about the terrorist problem, and about the need for “quick” and “strong justice” to replace the “joke” and “laughingstock” that our judicial system is these days.

But this was all just Trump talk, just designed to look like action. It was a weak man attempting to look strong.

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Send Trumpian denunciations to [email protected]. My email alerts moved to Canada, my Twitter feed to California, and my RSS feed was sent to Gitmo.