Washington Post
By Philip Bump
March 22, 2016
In
the wake of the bombings that killed dozens of people in Brussels on
Tuesday, Donald Trump — most likely safely cocooned in his luxurious
home at the top of the Manhattan skyscraper he
built — called in to Fox News to discuss terrorism and his proposed
response.
"I
would close up our borders to people until we figure out what’s going
on," Trump said to the hosts of the cable network's "Fox and Friends,"
sounding a bit groggy. "We have to be smart
in the United States. We're taking in people without real
documentation, we don't know where they're coming from, we don't know
what they're — where they're from, who they are."
It's
not clear whether Trump's off-the-cuff comments were meant to be a
reiteration of his past calls to ban Muslims from entering the United
States or if it's a new, more expansive call
to curtail all travel in and out of the country. The closest thing to
the latter we've seen in recent history was the grounding of flights
after 9/11 — a temporary measure narrowly focused on the precise type of
threat that had been presented. Beyond that,
and beyond laws in the early 20th Century limiting particular types of
immigration, we've never seen an incident in which the country halted
all migratory traffic. (Which, of course, would be a logistical
challenge of enormous scale.)
Trump's
past comments on closing the border to Muslims met with a receptive
audience from the public. National polling in the wake of Trump's
proposal showed support from members of his party
for the idea. When the question has been asked in exit polling from
Republican primaries, huge majorities expressed their support for the
idea — and pluralities of that group expressed their support for Trump
in every state except Ted Cruz's home of Texas.
The
attacks in Belgium came less than 24 hours after Trump outlined another
way in which he hoped to contract America's presence in the world. In
an interview with the editorial board of
The Post, he expressed skepticism about the U.S.'s role in NATO, the
international military alliance headquartered in Brussels.
"I
don’t want to pull it out," Trump said of America's role in the
alliance. But earlier, he envisioned a less-robust role: "Why is it that
other countries that are in the vicinity of the
Ukraine are not dealing with — why are we always the one that’s
leading, potentially the third world war, okay, with Russia? Why are we
always the ones that are doing it?"
This
is not dissimilar to his past comments about Syria. "Russia is in
Syria," he said last autumn about the fight against the Islamic State.
"Maybe we should let them do it? Let them do
it."
Despite
his later insistence that he would deal with the Islamic State
forcefully, there's a theme to Trump's rhetoric that is easy to
identify: isolationism. Trump wants the United States
to be the world's Trump Tower — a luxurious refuge with a strict
screening process where he feels absolutely safe. This is Trump's
broader m.o., of course — dropping in on primary states for same-day
trips and preferring to battle news anchors from behind
the tower's walls.
In
a time of fear — fear that President Obama, in an off-the-record
conversation earlier this week apparently pegged to cable news programs —
Trump's message has been a resonant one.
That his first response to the attacks in Brussels mirrored his broader sensibility should come as no surprise.
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