According to a Gallup poll taken the week after the atrocity in Orlando, only 29 percent of Democrats thought this was an Islamic terror attack. Fully 60 percent of all Democrats attributed the attack to “domestic gun violence.” Moreover, 42 percent of independents felt the same way. Only 44 percent attributed it to the Islamic holy war that has been declared on America and the West.

How is this possible? During the massacre, the terrorist himself took pains to post messages declaring that his acts were acts of Islamic terror against America. “Now taste the Islamic state vengeance,” one message said. Another warned, “in the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic state in the USA.” Moreover, in the days following the attack, a dossier of his behavior and associations going back more than fifteen years showed that he saw himself as a warrior for Islam and a jihadist in the making. The FBI had interviewed him twice — once in 2013 after co-workers reported that he made “inflammatory” comments to them about radical Islamic propaganda and the following year because of ties with a fellow Muslim who traveled to Syria to become a suicide bomber.

How then could 60 percent of Democrats and 42 percent of independents think that the killings in Orlando had nothing to do with radical Islam or Islamic terror? How could they think it was simply a matter of domestic gun violence similar to other mass shootings by deranged individuals whose motives had nothing to do with Islam or the Islamic state? The reason they could be so misled is because the president himself said it had nothing to do with Islam and warned that thinking it did was a form of bigotry that could hurt America — indeed would be a betrayal of America’s true self.

He went out of his way to mock Donald Trump who had said that it was radical Islamic terror and to insinuate that he was a bigot. The president’s disinformation and attack on Trump were seconded and amplified by the Democratic Party and the Democrat’s kept national media, who spent the days after the Orlando attack pushing gun control legislation and stressing the shooter’s “instability” and the alleged indeterminacy of his motives. And also tarring Trump as a bigot for taking the shooter at his word.

In this we have a microcosm of why all eight domestic terror attacks on Obama’s watch — beginning with the Fort Hood massacre and the Boston Marathon bombing — were carried out by individuals on the FBI’s radar who could have been stopped if the early warning signs of their commitments to the Islamic jihad hadn’t been dismissed.

Political correctness is a euphemism for the active, ideologically-motivated denial that has characterized the Democrats’ approach to Islamic terror going back to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. In that attack, 1,000 people were wounded and six were killed, but president Clinton refused to visit the site, while his administration took the view that the perpetrators were merely individuals who needed to be tried in criminal courts. In fact, they were soldiers in a holy war that radical Islamists had declared against America and the West.

Obama’s main concern, which has been manifest in his statements after each incidence of Islamic terror, has been to absolve the Islamists of any responsibility for the attacks. The Ft. Hood massacre was carried out by a disciple of Anwar al-Awlaki, the head of al-Qaeda in Libya, who described himself as a “Muslim Soldier” even though he was a Major in the U.S. army. He had said his murders were to avenge the Muslims that America had killed in Afghanistan. Yet the Obama administration dismissed his terrorist act as “workplace violence.”

The Obama administration has expunged all references to Islam from terrorist guidelines. Worse, it has enjoined the FBI from looking at the religious affiliations and commitments of potential suspects. This is the way the FBI was able to dismiss the warnings from Russian intelligence agents about the Boston Marathon bombers, who were Islamist militants. It is how American immigration officials allowed the Pakistani-born San Bernardino shooter to enter the country, despite her residence in a country that created the Taliban and protected Osama bin Laden and her association with a terrorist mosque.

This denial is also what has allowed Obama to respond to the Orlando massacre by issuing a million visas to Syrian Muslims, who will not be adequately vetted and will flood this country with individuals whose ranks ISIS and other Islamic terrorist groups have already infiltrated and who may be sympathetic to radical Islamic agendas in very large numbers.

Obama’s denial of the religious nature of the war that Islamic radicals have declared on America and his ability to require the FBI and other first responders to join in this denial is a form of unilateral disarmament paralleled by his determination to reduce America’s defense forces to their lowest levels since World War II. This denial — shared by the Democratic Party — is why we are losing the war with Islamic fanatics and why the homeland has become an increasingly dangerous place.

That Obama is able to seduce a very large number of Americans into sharing his denial is fact with ominous implications for the election in November and for America’s ability to right its current dangerous course. Obama has been abetted in this sinister effort by the feckless leadership of the Republican Party. In the days following the Orlando massacre, instead of hammering the president and the Democrats as a unified force, Republicans directed their fire at Donald Trump, joining Democrats in attempting to discredit his much-needed warning. They also tried to discredit Trump’s practical recommendations for turning the ship of state around: recognize the religious nature of the war against us; halt immigration from Muslim war zones until a proper vetting process is in place; surveil mosques and other recruitment centers for the jihadist enemy; restore America’s military power.

The self-serving anti-Trump salvos from Paul Ryan and other misguided Republican leaders made the Republican message — gun violence is not the problem, radical Islam is — incoherent or at least so diluted as to allow Obama and the Democrats to prevail in the debate. If the Orlando post-mortem is an indication, the election may not go well in November. If that is the case, not only Donald Trump, but America’s hopes for a safer future, will fail.