Trump’s Catastrophe Test

Last year was a profile-raising phase for ISIS, as the death-cult took the lives of over 1,500 civilians around the world in a string of brutal terrorist attacks — a small number in relative terms but a significant uptick in the damage they inflicted compared to 2015.

They have also continued to experiment with new ways of inflicting terror, utilizing trucks in Nice and Berlin to inflict mass fatalities and modifying off-the-shelf drones to create stunningly accurate, deadly, unmanned bombers which have so far been limited to the battlefield.

Attacks on U.S. soil by self-radicalized jihadists like the Ohio State shooting and the massacre at Orlando nightclub Pulse remind us of a harsh reality — that despite their sporadic and unpredictable nature, these attacks have begun to feel inevitable to many. National security experts agree that the salient question is not if there will be another terrorist attack, it’s when and where the next attack will be.

This uncertainty serves as a useful reminder of the reality that more often than not, the tenure of U.S. Presidents tend to be determined much more by what happens to them than the agendas they had planned to focus on.

President Obama’s eight years began in the shadow of the recession and his foreign policy legacy was permanently altered by the events of the Arab Spring, and the Bush administration before him saw its entire course forever altered by the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. President Reagan’s inauguration was punctuated by the release of u.S. hostages from Iran, while the illegal arms sales he authorized in an attempt to free more hostages would define the final chapter of his administration.

The list goes on, with F.D.R. guiding the nation through WWII, Bush Sr. struggling to define our role as sole world power following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Jimmy Carter’s unfortunate luck when it came to inflation, oil prices, and hostages all serving as classic examples of Presidents facing down disaster.

This pattern inevitably begs the unsettling question — what will Trump’s catastrophe test be?

Amid the media frenzy created by his consistently sub-40% approval ratings and numerous looming investigations into his campaign’s relationship with Russia, it’s worth noting that virtually all of the damage Trump has suffered so far is self-inflicted.

The second Bush Administration may have lost credibility when its claims of “WMDs” in Iraq turned out to be false, but that came after a terrorist attack that rattled our national consciousness and years of a slowly unfolding political drama.

The paradigm on truth has now shifted so far that Americans have started to accept a President who parrots paraphrased falsehoods as the new normal. Our new version of reality T.V. is watching the Director of the F.B.I. deny that there is any evidence to support the President’s claim that he was illegally wiretapped by his predecessor.

So naturally, the question then becomes: what exactly will happen when thing go bad and the country needs a leader to look to ? What will happen if hundreds, or even thousands are killed in an attack? How will President Trump respond — what will he do — who will he blame?

His statements so far are less than reassuring. Immediately following the shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida last year Trump tweeted “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!”

The tweet reveals Trump’s instinct to seize on any opportunity to promote himself and his policies. Further, after his Muslim ban was struck down by a federal court President Trump tweeted “If something happens blame him and the court system. People pouring in. Bad!”

This preemptive attempt to blame the judiciary for any future terrorist attack earned Trump a rebuke from his own Supreme Court nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch, who said recently during his confirmation hearing, “When anyone criticizes the honesty or the integrity or the motives of a federal judge, I find that disheartening. I find that demoralizing — because I know the truth,” and when asked if ‘anyone’ includes the President, Gorsuch said, “Anyone is anyone.”

Ultimately, the American public remains precariously devoid of any unifying leader who we can turn to in times of crisis. Invading Iraq may have been the wrong decision in hindsight, but President Bush never attempted to blame another branch of government for the attacks of 9/11 and he enjoyed bipartisan support from Congress as well as the public at the time.

Most importantly, no President has had nearly as contemptuous a relationship with the truth as Trump. How that will play out when we need to trust him remains to be seen. As Vox’s Ezra Klein put it, “You don’t always have to agree with the President, but particularly when you’re dealing with a foreign crisis, you actually need to trust them.”

The point is, we’ve never known what it’s like to be out at sea, completely rudderless, with everyone paddling in different directions. But we might find out soon.