The worse it gets, the better Trump will look to many voters.
America might need a strong man like Trump every so often.
Politico: In his victory speech after last week’s Florida primary, Donald Trump pinpointed the key moment in his meteoric political rise: “Paris happened.”
Trump said that after the November terrorist attacks that left 130 dead in the French capital, soon followed by a terrorist massacre in San Bernardino, California, his campaign “took on a whole new meaning … And all of a sudden the poll numbers just shot up.”
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Now many national security specialists fear that further attacks like the bombings that killed at least 30 people in Brussels on Tuesday will fuel Trump’s further rise, drawing more voters to his clenched-fist approach of closed borders and retribution killings — and could ultimately pave his unlikely path to the White House.
“In a climate of fear, Trump’s semi-authoritarian, unilateralist approach may be more appealing,” said Thomas Wright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has written about Trump’s strongman political style. “I don’t think so. But I might be wrong. It may be that people are so frightened that they’re willing to endorse policies that nobody over the last 50 years has even raised as remote possibility.”
All of these issues are, in fact, pillars of the aggressive response we have seen by Donald Trump in response to the news today,” said Elizabeth J. Zechmeister, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University. She is the co-author, with University of California Riverside professor Jennifer L. Merolla, of the book Democracy at Risk: How Terrorist Threats Affect the Public.
Warning that more attacks in the U.S. are likely, Trump on Tuesday renewed his calls for a return to the waterboarding of terror suspects — which Congress outlawed last year — and warned that radical Muslims are infiltrating the U.S.
In a cautionary note for Democrats, Merolla said that their research showed that frightened voters do not necessarily look for traditional leadership qualities such as Clinton’s long tenure in government. She added that female politicians “are typically at a disadvantage” when terrorism is a dominant issue.
There was some evidence on Tuesday of pro-Trump sentiment emerging from unlikely quarters. “Hate Donald Trump all you like, but at least he seems to recognise the magnitude of the threat and at least he has firm proposals for how to try to defeat it,” the former CNN prime-time host Piers Morgan, generally considered a liberal, wrote in the Daily Mail. “[H]ow many more scenes like this morning’s appalling images from Brussels are we going to tolerate before we try a non-PC option to beat these disgusting excuses for human beings?”
Some Democrats still have bad memories of the 2004 election, when then-Senator John Kerry failed to unseat a vulnerable incumbent in President George W. Bush thanks in part, former Kerry aides said, to voter fears about terrorism.
