The Republican candidate for the presidency, Donald Trump, now reacts to any terrorist incident with crude cynicism. While the incessant killings of Americans by Americans prove only that America needs more guns, a failed killing by an American Muslim is “a terrible thing that is going on in our country … an attack on America”.

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The hamfisted New York bombing suspect, Ahmad Khan Rahami, was to Trump not just guilty before trial but a “foreign enemy combatant”, to be detained indefinitely until the end of hostilities. America should “knock the hell” out of such “Islamics” and stop being “gentle”.

Trump complained that the United States “will now give [Rahami] amazing hospitalisation, the best doctors in the world, and probably room service”. Worst of all his “punishment will not be what it once would have been”. As for Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, he accused her immigration policy of being directly responsible. He said: “We now know why terrorists want her so badly to be president.”

In the potential leader of a great democracy, this is alarmist drivel. We should also be careful, since the exploitation of existential fear has long been a feature of America’s isolated political culture. In 1950, a little-known American senator, Estes Kefauver, achieved national fame by holding televised hearings into America’s “organised crime”, drawing on blood-curdling fantasies of a Sicilian-American “mafia”. This mafia was, Kefauver claimed, holding American cities to ransom. Communities lived in fear of it. The national economy was menaced by it.

The televised hearings were at times ludicrous. One hoodlum after another was dragged to Washington to protest that all he was running was a few protection rackets on the Lower East Side. Try as Kefauver might to find a Mr Big to justify his extravagant hearings, he found only a disorganised trail of small-time hoods. He still demanded a new Washington bureaucracy to “crack down on organised crime” – and ran unsuccessfully for president. The search for “a mafia” was subcontracted to Hollywood.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A still from WABC TV showing a man believed to be the New York bombing suspect. Photograph: WABC-TV/Reuters

Two years later another senator, Joe McCarthy, decided to exploit a different “existential” scare. His committee investigated what he claimed was the “massive” penetration of the government and military by communists and homosexuals. Fear of a spurious threat to the state was turned into a witch-hunt by McCarthy and his aide, a certain Richard Nixon. There was a red under every bed – and a blackmailer in it. McCarthy, until his mental collapse, became a national celebrity. Americans have seemed to get a frisson from being told they are threatened, perhaps because they never have been.

Likewise with Trump. The New York bomber was no more attacking America than, in Britain, Lee Rigby’s killers were “attacking Britain”. Why lend them such glory? These are pathetic groups, sometimes just individuals, committing nasty crimes. For better or worse, it happens every day. That the criminals occasionally yell, “Allahu Akbar” should be neither here nor there. That they may have travelled to the Middle East or downloaded jihadi tracts is a legitimate concern to the police. It is not a threat to the stability, let alone the existence, of the state. Yet such is the current hysteria that he is to be prosecuted for having a “weapon of mass destruction”, namely a pressure cooker.

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How often need we state that such exaggeration is precisely what the terrorist wants? It turns the impossible into the rhetorically plausible. Trump last week dusted a backstreet bomb-maker with the glory of war. He afforded him the gigantic kudos of political status.

The west’s response to jihadi terrorism since 9/11 has been wholly counter-productive. Under the pretext of “public reassurance”, it has sown the seeds of fear in the hope of harvesting votes of gratitude. Just as there was once a mafia round every corner and a red in every bed, so now Joseph Conrad’s terrorists lurk “like pests in every street of men”. If one harvest has come in votes – George Bush and Tony Blair did very well from 9/11 – the gourmand at the feast has been terrorism itself. Osama bin Laden’s tiny cabal has been turned into a global movement, drenched in blood, retribution and violent glamour.

Clinton’s reaction to the New York explosions may have seemed pedestrian, but it was correct. It was to counsel responsibility, “smart law-enforcement and good intelligence in concert with our values”. It reminded us of the response of mayor Rudy Giuliani after 9/11, when he told New Yorkers not to panic but to go to the park, see a show, buy a pizza and “continue with your normal lives”. This was the opposite of Blair’s response, which was to declare that 9/11 “changed the world” and “rewrote the rules of the game”. I could hear Bin Laden cheering.

As Richard English shows in his new study, Does Terrorism Work?, we need to remind ourselves what this -ism sets out to do. Its rational ambition is to change the world around it. Nor does it always fail, as some might argue in the case of the IRA. Violence in a political cause is as old as history. Civil terror is a classic tool of the weak against the strong.

In the case of modern jihadism, brutal mayhem has yet to deliver it a stable caliphate. But it has laid its groundwork in ethnic and religious polarisation between Muslim and non-Muslim. It has undermined the tolerance of western democracies. From America’s detention without trial to Theresa May’s snooper’s charter, it has slit open the soft underbelly of liberalism.

Such a gain for terrorism is the result of foolish politicians looking for cheap votes – and the media looking for cheap headlines. Scaremongering, the search for a foe against whom to pretend to defend the state, may be as old as terror itself. But given the absolute security of modern America and Britain, it is a dangerous self-indulgence. It should be excoriated.

It is not the bomb that is the terrorist’s accomplice but the response to the bomb. It is not Rahami but Trump’s response to Rahami that we should fear.