Donald Trump’s morning tweets on Wednesday included a startling statistic:
What makes this statistic so startling isn’t the breakdown of terrorism, it’s the demonstration of just how much deception can be baked into a single number. Because this value, which comes from a new report released by Jeff Sessions’s Justice Department, demonstrates just how willing Republicans are to indulge the xenophobic nationalism at the heart of Trump’s support.
To support the “foreign terrorism” framing, homegrown terrorism is almost never called terrorism, no matter how extreme.
"It was an act of pure evil," President Trump said — but the president and law enforcement officials have refrained from calling [the Las Vegas shooting] terrorism.
But even pre-defining terrorism so that it only applies to a certain group of criminals doesn’t generate numbers scary enough to satisfy the Jefferson Sessions-Stephen Miller-Donald Trump axis of white supremacy. Both the report and the tweet are far more deceptive than that.
The report counts those who committed terrorist acts overseas and were brought here to face trial – such individuals are not ‘immigrants’ by any stretch of the imagination.
They are in Sessions’s report, and in the number that Trump tweeted. And in the White House background call offered to reporters. And in the White House press conference today.
At the same time, the report ignores the largest, fastest-growing source of terror in the United States—right-wing extremists.
When it comes to actual terrorism going on inside the United States …
Despite the nation’s intense national focus on Islamic terrorism since 9/11, homegrown, right wing extremists have also killed dozens of Americans. The groups include white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups and anti-federalists militias. Since 2001, the number of violent attacks on U.S. soil inspired by far-right ideology has spiked to an average of more than 300 a year, according to a study by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.
But naturally, the Trump White House is protecting their ridiculous number, because it fits their narrative: Immigrants are the source of all evil. Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer has released a response.
“The Trump Administration’s immigration report, which paints a misleading picture of a nation under assault from foreigners seeking to bring terrorism, domestic violence, and economic drain to our country, has one goal: to distract from the President's failure to address the present DACA crisis.”
Actually it has a larger goal—feeding the xenophobia and nationalism that’s been at the heart of Trumpism since he rode that gold escalator down to start his campaign with tales of Mexican rapists and drug runners. In fact, there’s probably no point more critical to Trump’s base than maintaining the illusion that America is a white Christian puddle in a sea of hostile brownness.
That propaganda is worth generating this statistically indefensible report, then dragging out a Deputy Attorney General from Jefferson Sessions’s Department of Rolling Back Civil Rights.
By restricting the definition of terrorism to those who act in the name of movements centered outside of the United States, and adding in those brought to the United States for trial, the Trump White House perpetuates a stereotype that is simply not true. One that leads directly to incidents like this.
“I’m protesting the DNC running such a radical leftist candidate,” [a conservative Tennessee man named Jim David] Adkisson wrote. “Osama Hussein Obama, yo mama. No experience, no brains, a joke. Dangerous to America, he looks like Curious George!” He was appalled by the race-mixing mores of modern times as exemplified by Obama’s mother: “How is a white woman having a niger [sic] baby progress?” he asked.
In July 2008, Adkisson walked into a Unitarian Universalist church in downtown Knoxville during a performance of a children’s musical, armed with a 12-gauge shotgun. He opened fire, killing two people and wounding seven more.
Incidents like that aren’t considered terrorism in the new report. It’s why “misleading” is the most generous term used when describing the Sessions report.
The Trump administration has frequently been accused of cherry-picking data to fit its agenda, and experts say this is another example, especially as the report came out of Trump’s infamous executive order last February banning travel from Muslim-majority countries and halting the refugee program, ostensibly for national security reasons.
A report ordered up by Trump to support his Muslim ban and cobbled together by Jefferson Sessions shockingly determines that Muslims are terrorists—by defining terrorism as something Muslims do, importing Muslims from overseas to bolster their numbers, and ignoring the rising violence of white supremacists.
It’s not just a lie, it’s a dangerous lie that plays on unfounded fears while ignoring real concerns.