For perhaps the first time, the national punditry and the White House's team of white nationalists can both agree on something: they're both bubblingly pleased with last night's Donald Trump speech.
White House aide Sebastian Gorka, who at Trump's inaugural ball wore a Hungarian military medal associated with Nazi collaborators and who has been pilloried for his ties to anti-Semitic groups, was particularly pleased with Donald Trump's explicit enunciation of the phrase "radical Islamic terrorism."
The President’s one line on the subject during his speech to a joint session of Congress was the “most important” takeaway, Gorka told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. [...]
“They expected us to dilute the verbiage. He said radical Islamic terrorism,” he went on, pausing between words for emphasis. “Politico, did you hear it? New York Times, did you hear it? Washington Post, CNN did you hear it? The president is not backing down.”
But it wasn't Politico or the New York Times that asked Trump to "back down" on this one: It was his own national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who like nearly all military men, government officials, terrorism experts, and anyone else whose expertise on the subject extends past writing angry screeds on racist websites was quite explicit that the conflation of Islam and terrorism is both incorrect and counterproductive.
Gorka isn't gloating about the Bannon, Miller, Gorka-demanded approach winning out over the delicate sensibilities of the national press; he's gloating that the extremist language won out over the administration's own national security team. Team Chaos is insistent that they're going to do the opposite of whatever all previous experts advised—seemingly just for spite.
“We’re not going to listen to so-called terrorism experts who were linked in any way to the last eight years of disastrous counterterrorism,” Gorka said. “We’re going to take a new approach. We have a new President.”
Mind you, the counterterrorism efforts of the Obama administration were, for all their faults, considerably more successful than those of the Bush administration. And even the Bush administration was uniform on separating out "terrorism" from overt hostility toward Islam itself, much to the fury of nationalists like Bannon and Gorka. So it's not eight years of policy Gorka is going against, but the collected wisdom of nearly everyone with actual counterterrorism knowledge.
Trump's approach of banning "Muslim immigration,” inflating and propagandizing immigrant-linked crime, and otherwise treating non-white, non-Christian Americans with open contempt will not make us safer. To Trump's team, that's beside the point. The anti-Muslim rhetoric was never intended as a tool against terrorism, but against refugees, immigrants, and the ever-dangerous non-white other.