Donald Trump has spent the bulk of his new presidency playing tough in the face of terrorism. Yet pretty much everything he’s proposed, beyond being bigoted in the extreme, shows just how terrified and weak he is – all while putting the country at greater risk.

This week, Trump spent much of his time claiming – falsely – that the media downplays terrorist attacks for “reasons” he did not explain. “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported,” he proclaimed at a military event on Tuesday. “And in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.” The White House followed up with a list of 73 terror attacks over the past few years which they claimed were “under-covered”.

The idea that the media downplays terror attacks is hard to fathom. For 15 years, terror attacks – and countless terror threats that never materialized – have led to wall-to-wall coverage on television, in print and online. Many times such coverage has led to politicians to implement disturbing policies that would have done nothing to prevent the attacks in the first place and only further restrict the rights of millions of innocent people.

The numbers back up just how undeniably wrong Trump’s claims are: Peter Bergen at CNN calculated that the 78 terrorist attacks the White House claimed were “under-reported” were the subject of 80,000 articles. 80,000!

But what makes Trump’s uneducated musing even more infuriating is that at the same time as he instills fear into the American people about Islamist terrorism – which only does the terrorists’ job for them – he’s going out of his way to create a blind spot inside the US government for an arguably greater threat: terrorism committed by white nationalist, far-right groups.

The media under-reports threat of Islamic terrorism – to Muslims Read more

According to Reuters, Trump wants to change the name of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Countering Violent Extremism” program to “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism”. Under this plan, violent white supremacists would no longer be targeted. Meanwhile, his “list” of 78 terror attacks that the White House released this week contained exactly zero white supremacist incidents.

Amidst this latest Trump controversy, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked pointed questions of Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway about why, after all the complaining Trump has done of the media’s coverage of terror attacks, he didn’t tweet anything about the most recent terror attack in Canada. The answer, as Tapper indicated, is the attack was carried out by a white supremacist against Muslims, which made for a very awkward response from Conway that ended with: “of course put us on the record as always being sad about this as a senseless loss of life”. Not exactly the tough talk Trump’s team reserves for Islamic terrorism, but I guess that’s to be expected when white nationalists make up some of Trump’s fan base.

The facts speak for themselves. Americans have been more likely to have been killed by a white supremacist terrorist than Islamic terrorism since 9/11. Refugees from any country have literally never carried out a fatal terrorist attack in the US.

Career national security officials and civil liberties advocates vehemently disagree on almost everything, but it seems there’s one that unites them: alienating millions of people based on their national origin or religion is an awful way to go about stopping terrorist groups. That’s especially true when some of these groups feed off the perception that the west is at war against Islam. And there’s been plenty of reports about Isis using Trump’s policies as a recruiting tool to gain more converts.

None of these facts matter to Trump, of course. He apparently wants upend society, tear families apart and amplify the terrorists’ message for them. Worse, he’s doing all this while trying to blame judges and the American people for coming attacks. It’s beyond cynical; it’s deplorable, and he’s only going to get worse.

That’s the most terrifying aspect of all this: we haven’t seen a terrorist attack in the US since Trump has been elected. Some of the country’s most despicable and bigoted policies have been implemented in the immediate aftermath of attack. There’s no telling what Trump will do when the next one comes around.

