Ask yourself this question: What if the shoe had been on the other foot? Just imagine the reaction from Donald Trump and his supporters if Russia had acted to influence American voters, and Hillary Clinton had been elected president. It would make the relatively muted protests we’ve seen in recent weeks look like a fat, wet kiss. Because he reaped the benefits, however, the Trump team simply denies that anything happened. They put Trump and the Republican Party over country. Doing so—even on a matter of national security—is nothing new for the GOP.
Trump’s reaction to an event from this week—the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey—further illustrates the point. Let’s start with some background. Trump and many other Republicans for years before him have slammed President Obama for not using the modifier “radical Islamic” or something similar when talking about terrorist attacks committed by people who identify as Muslim.
First, let’s remind ourselves why the president refuses to describe these terrorist murderers as Muslim:
These are people who've killed children, killed Muslims, take sex slaves, there's no religious rationale that would justify in any way any of the things that they do. But what I have been careful about when I describe these issues is to make sure that we do not lump these murderers into the billion Muslims that exist around the world, including in this country, who are peaceful, who are responsible, who, in this country, are fellow troops and police officers and fire fighters and teachers and neighbors and friends
Furthermore, Obama wants to deny groups like ISIS the “legitimacy” for which they are so “desperate.” As he further explained: “they try to portray themselves as religious leaders—holy warriors in defense of Islam. That’s why ISIL presumes to declare itself the ‘Islamic State.’ And they propagate the notion that America—and the West, generally—is at war with Islam.” Calling them ‘Islamic’ would completely validate their claim to represent Islam.
In other words, President Obama won’t use that descriptor because he believes doing so hurts our national security, that it puts Americans at risk. One thing his decision is not based on is politics. If he wanted to put politics first and improve his popularity, the easiest way to do so would’ve been, after an attack, to thump his chest and bleat about how we won’t let Islamic terrorists beat us. But he didn’t. He put our country first.
That’s the context for President-elect Trump’s statement after a man murdered Russian Ambassador Andrey Karlov at an art gallery last Monday in Turkey’s capital, Ankara. Just before committing the act, the killer had shouted in Arabic: “God is great! [NOTE: “Allahu Akbar”] Those who pledged allegiance to Muhammad for jihad. God is great!” and then, in Turkish: “Don’t forget Aleppo! Don’t forget Syria!” Trump immediately released a statement characterizing the assassin as a “radical Islamic terrorist.”
How did Trump know this right away? The murderer was certainly angry at Russia’s backing of Syrian President Assad in the civil war that has reduced much of that country to rubble. Is that fact alone enough to put this particular killer in the same ideological category as ISIS? That may turn out to be the case, but Trump doesn’t wait for the full story before tweeting, and certainly doesn’t seem to consider such questions important in the first place. His purpose in saying “radical Islamic terrorist” was simple: to show he’ll say the thing Obama won’t. In other words, it’s politics.
For Trump and his fellow Republicans, this is just another version of the War on Christmas, where only a few brave souls have the courage to stand up for those who dare mention the true reason for the season.
Let’s go back a few months. After the June murder of 49 people on Latino night at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Trump went after the president, who had earlier in the day spoken about the terrorist attack: “In his remarks today, President Obama disgracefully refused to even say the words 'Radical Islam.' For that reason alone, he should step down.”
Once upon a time, there was a relatively high bar for calling on the president of the United States to resign the office to which the people had elected him. It’s a safe a guess that no serious presidential candidate had ever done so in the midst of a campaign before this year. Yet the one who did got elected president.
Trump turned the murder of more than four dozen people into a political wedge issue. Party over country. Politics over security. That’s what Republicans do. Could you imagine Barack Obama doing that? Could you imagine Trump not?
Ask yourself what kind of thinking lies behind the decision to do so. Is it just naked ambition? Is it a sense of entitlement that runs so deep that doing anything necessary to gain power becomes justified? It’s not solely about one individual, however, given how widespread is the phenomenon of Republicans putting party over country, party over security, or party over democracy (see: Carolina, North and Garland, Merrick).
Ask yourself what kind of thinking leads a party’s top congressional figures to decide—after Barack Obama won in a landslide not seen in a generation and during the worst economic crash since the Great Depression—to “show united and unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies.” What was their motivation? To sabotage the recovery and defeat him four years later. Republicans always put party first. These events are all connected.
The time has long passed for Democrats to fully acknowledge what their opponents across the aisle are not only capable of doing, but have been doing for many years. The only way to stop this behavior is to make Republicans pay for it at the ballot box.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Potomac Books).