John* says: “See these two articles. Adams’ post explains how Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims resonates with Latinos, and Mercer explains the reason that Obama’s cost analysis of living with terrorism while working to defeat it using the strategy as explained by Beinart, shows an essential lack of understanding of the fear of terrorism and why Trump does understand it.”
When polls show that Latino voters in America favor banning Muslim immigration, Trump has greased his path to a landslide.
I don’t think he planned the immigration surprise to happen this early. But he got the opening and he took it. (I predicted it would happen after the nomination.)
On a related note, I understand Trump is defending his Muslim immigration ban by telling the public they are thinking it but he said it. That’s the most powerful persuasion technique there is (literally, in my experience). The general form of it involves an educated guess about a person’s inner thoughts. When you tell people what they are thinking, while they are thinking it, and while they think their thoughts are mostly concealed, they hand you the keys to their brain. (It would take longer to explain why.)
Other candidates tell voters what they should think. Sometimes they say what voters do think, but they do so only for obvious issues such as voters preferring lower crime rates. You won’t see a vanilla politician tell you what your secret inner thoughts are, and get it right. The latter is industrial-grade persuasion. The former is just lips moving.
I think there is another immigration surprise planned for after the nomination, but this first one might be all he needed. In movies you often see the hero escape the 3rd Act problem only to fall into greater danger in the final minutes. So movies generally have a big escape followed by another clever escape in the final minutes. Trump might get to use his second immigration surprise toward the final stretch.
Mr. Trump appears genuinely outraged by this crass and cruel political calculus. Trump was not going along with the notions implicit in the strategies proposed by the administration and the colluding political duopoly. These are that we trade a few American lives, every so often, in return for getting to boast about America’s commitment to “freedom,” our “open society,” all the intangible nostrums Rome-on-the-Potomac instructs us to celebrate.
Mr. Trump was not OK with the idea that mass murder by Muslim, every now and then, was the price of “our tolerance.”
Trump’s visceral response seems odd to the political class and their media barnacles because it’s the reaction of a regular, clear-thinking individual who has yet to be housebroken by Washington.
If you’re a Jihadi who’s traveled to train abroad—American, permanent resident or anything else—“you are never-ever coming back into the US,” vowed Trump. Having suggested the same a few months back (“A Modest Libertarian Proposal: Keep Jihadis OUT, Not IN”), I would venture that immigration is a political grant of privilege; there is no natural right to immigrate into the U.S., not least if you are fixing to kill your coworkers.
Later, Trump followed up with a more radical statement; radical from a political perspective. He “called for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”:
According to Pew Research, among others, there is great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population. Most recently, a poll from the Center for Security Policy released data showing “25% of those polled agreed that violence against Americans here in the United States is justified as a part of the global jihad” and 51% of those polled, “agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah.”
“Without looking at the various polling data,” stated Mr. Trump, “it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life.”
SQUANDERING VS. CONSERVING SCARCE RESOURCES
To grasp why Trump would counsel something so practical, yet so politically improper, one has to understand Trump the businessman.
Good businessmen are programmed differently than politicians. As a tremendously gifted entrepreneur, Trump is averse to squandering scarce resources, money or manpower.
By contrast, politicians do not understand the natural economic reality of scarcity. They control the production of money for their promiscuous purposes and they exert power over millions of interchangeable people in their territorial jurisdiction.
To a politician, 14 lives in 322 million is a small price to pay for “our freedoms.” Trump’s political rivals look at the price exacted by a Muslim like Syed Farouk and his bride in the aggregate. Fourteen dead is not a steep price to pay for unfettered immigration from Islamic countries, peddled politically as “our values,” “our tolerance,” “our greatness.” This callous calculus is second nature to politicians like Lindsey Graham or Darth Vader Cheney.
Not to Trump. “This must stop. We can’t have this,” he roared.
See, statistics are funny things. Insignificant probabilities, in this case an attack on each one of us, are immaterial unless they happen to YOU or ME. It is this calculus that politicians peddle. They rely on the fact that we’ll adopt their sloganeering because each one of us is unlikely to die by Muslim.
But to do nothing stateside, as Trump’s rivals imply, is to accept that lives lost are, in the grand scheme, insignificant.
The opposite is true for Trump. Taking losses offends his sensibilities. Trump, the consummate businessman, abhors and is angered by the preventable squandering of scarce assets: American lives. (Yes, Trump is an American Firster.) The death of a few Americans pains Mr. Trump, something that cannot be said about Obama, Hillary, Bernie or any of the insider GOPers.
