The cowardice of Trump

Minor explosions hit New York City and New Jersey last weekend, injuring 31 people in Chelsea, luckily none of them fatally. The perpetrator was allegedly one Ahmad Khan Rahami, who was found passed out in the doorway of a New Jersey bar, and captured after a shootout with police. He was apparently inspired by resentment of various American wars in the Middle East.

Donald Trump immediately jumped to a typically Trumpy conclusion: We need collective punishment, in the form of racial profiling. He gestured to Israel's system as proof-of-concept, and argued that liberal anti-racist sensibilities are harming American security. "We're trying to be so politically correct in our country and this is only going to get worse," he said. (In an equally Trumpy move, he later denied having said any such thing.) Later, supposedly trawling for black votes, he endorsed another form of racist profiling, stop-and-frisk.

Trump is wrong about the utility of racist policy. But there's something else on display here: cowardice. Donald Trump, and the people who support his bigoted and unconstitutional fake shortcuts to security, are all chickens.

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As usual, it's not super clear what a Trump profiling system would look like. But considered in light of his constant attacks on Latinos, Arabs, and Muslims — particularly his call to ban all Muslim entry into the United States — a rough guess is easy enough. It would be some system of surveillance and harassment of Muslims, particularly those of Middle Eastern descent. (Ironically, even Israel's profiling system is not nearly so broad-based.)

Now, the New York Police Department once did something akin to this in secret. But any Trump plan is certain to be explicitly aimed at Muslims, in keeping with his crusade against "political correctness." Therefore, it would almost certainly be unconstitutional, violating the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause — especially the Muslim entry ban.

So let's carefully examine what set off this latest flap. Rahami apparently put three pipe bombs in a trash can near the start of a Marine Corps race in New Jersey, only one of which exploded on Saturday morning, but nobody was hurt. He later went to Chelsea, in Manhattan, and set a pressure cooker bomb under a dumpster in a piece of luggage. That one did explode, accounting for all the injuries. He left another four blocks away, but when someone pulled the bomb out in the process of stealing the luggage, they seem to have inadvertently disabled the explosive.

Apparently, Rahami used similar phones, at least some of which he had used personally. That, combined with a fingerprint found on one of the unexploded bombs, led authorities to Rahami within hours — and the fact that he was sleeping on the street made his capture a foregone conclusion.

In other words, it was a clumsy, amateurish operation — only remotely competent in comparison with the plots the FBI is endlessly tricking mentally ill people into attempting. Like virtually all terrorists, this guy is a complete chump. The threat was not very great, and law enforcement authorities were more than equal to the task.

Incidentally, this bears comparison with an incident last year, when an anti-abortion extremist shot up a Planned Parenthood in Colorado. Given the extensive history of right-wing white terrorism in this country, it would make exactly as much sense to collapse into hysterics over this incident as it does over the New York bombing (which is to say, none at all). If Trump weren't a huge racist hypocrite, he'd be calling for profiling white men, putting informants and surveillance in conservative churches, imprisoning "radicalizers" on conservative talk radio, and so on.

That, of course, would be an idiotic thing to do. Police would be swamped with a deluge of irrelevant nonsense, making it harder to carry out the shoe-leather police and intelligence work that actually works against domestic terrorism.

But not only that, such actions would also be an act of massive cowardice.

The simple fact of being alive means a constant risk of death, steadily growing to 100 percent. At any moment a blood vessel might pop in your brain, or your heart might give out, or you could be hit by a car crossing the street, killing you instantly. You might be felled by a silent gas leak, or your own cells gone haywire, or simply falling down in the shower.

In order to live any sort of reasonable life, you cannot be constantly flipping out about the inevitability of onrushing death. You've got to summon up some combination of looking past it, and accepting danger without panic — what we might call courage. Some unusually idealistic people have even been known to argue that mortal danger is worth chancing to preserve a certain form of government, where innocent people, no matter their ethnic or religious background, can go about their business free from state oppression.

Trump's willingness to indulge unconstitutional bigotry to deal with terrorism is not courage, and it's not "tough." It's nothing more than a weak, frightened man indulging the worst human instincts by enacting a worthless and unfair charade on the backs of an unpopular minority.