Security experts will analyze the Trump Insurrection of Jan. 6 for decades. Historians will interpret and re-interpret it for centuries. More immediate is the need to prevent the armed protests being planned by Trump’s loyalists (royalists?) for Jan. 16-20 in the capitols of all 50 states and again in Washington, D.C. In the near term, however, how does the country put this malevolent genie back in the bottle, or at least deprive the insurrectionist MAGA movement of the oxygen needed to sustain it?
Juliette Kayyem, former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and a national security expert, explains for The Atlantic how Donald Trump, president and promoter of domestic terrorism, has fed the violence that erupted in Washington, D.C. last week:
Trump has gotten away with all of this by never quite acknowledging what he was doing. He is a master of a technique that I have described as stochastic terrorism—the incitement of random but utterly predictable acts of violence for political gain. He portrays himself as a victim and rallies his troops to fight for him, but does so in a way that never directly exposes his responsibility. Fight, he tells them, to protect his political standing. And that is what some of them did on January 6.
Viewing Trump’s insurrection through a counterterrorism lens unlocks some insights about how to deradicalize his most violent supporters. Successful efforts to fight terrorism begin at the top. An ideology may survive and linger, but to curtail a terror threat requires what counterterrorism experts call “leadership decapitation.” (The meaning is figurative.) Society is more likely to heal when an extremist group’s ideological leader is isolated and damaged in the eyes of his supporters.
Voters kicked off that effort on Nov. 3. But Trump’s drive to manifest his own reality by insisting up is down, black is white, and his landslide loss was a win have helped keep the helium from totally escaping his balloon. Today, the House will vote to impeach him a second time. This time, a few Republicans will join the Democrats’ effort. Miraculously, a few found Jesus after the insurrectionist mob failed to find and lynch them.
The past week has already seriously damaged Trump. Social media firms have cut him off from his favorite propaganda tools. Controversial perhaps, says Kayyem, but “deplatforming is a successful counterterrorism technique that, although it may galvanize diehards, impedes a movement leader’s ability to reach new members.” Losing the Oval Office will not help either.
Corporate donors for now have pulled support from Republicans who backed Trump’s efforts to overturn election results. Trump’s business partners and lenders are fleeing. Real estate brokers that help manage his properties no longer want his business. Already hundreds of millions in debt personally, Trump’s business teeters. The Trump brand and the Trump Organization is toast.
All the while, law-enforcement agencies have been identifying and making very public arrests of people who forced their way into the Capitol and were pictured on surveillance video or social media. Those mugging for Instagram may have believed that they were cosplaying a revolution and that Trump would protect them, but would-be recruits to Trump’s movements will be more aware of the potential legal consequences of committing violence in his name.
And immediate economic consequences. MAGA revolutionaries have returned home to find their employment terminated. Legal consequences may follow.
Kayyem concludes:
During his political career, Trump has given comfort to and conferred logistical coherence upon a coalition that will not die without him—but also will not thrive. The United States is a divided nation, but only a tiny fraction of Trump’s more than 74 million voters showed up in Washington, D.C., eager to fight. The way to unite this country is to isolate acts of violence—and a leader who incites it—from legitimate expression. Trump was a north star for a certain kind of radical. Americans will be safer the more that star loses its shine.
A certain kind of radical wrote online in advance of the Jan. 6 insurrection, “Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”
Who says things like that? Who even thinks it? Over one man, much less over career criminal, huckster, and fraud Donald J. Trump? Kayyem views the Trump insurrection through a counterterrorism lens because that is her training. But there is far more going on that will not evaporate once Trump is defrocked.
Trump is a cult leader not just for who he is but for what he represents to the MAGA faithful. He is their last, best chance for preserving the social-racial hierarchy they believe God Himself bequeathed them: male-dominated, white, straight, conservative, and Christian (after a fashion). When Trump speaks of “caravans” of invaders, rapists, and child-traffickers from south of the border, he taps directly into their brain stems. He speaks to inchoate fears of loss of power and social dominance that Republicans have exploited since the advent of the Southern Strategy. Trump juiced those fears with enough fentanyl that followers would die for him. Their fervor may subside somewhat with him out of office and/or in jail, but their fears will not disappear.
Plus, Trump embodies a special kind of power perhaps not appreciated before now. While populists may resent the way wealthy elites float above the rules they prescribe for others, Trump offers for a low, low price that special, Trump-branded grace to Americans of more modest means. Those who stormed the Capitol last week behaved as if somehow they would escape accountability for their actions, as indeed their avatar has his entire life. Like most other Trump products, it may have been another con, but it was heady stuff.