The big news from Donald Trump counterterrorism speech Monday is his proposal for an “ideological litmus test” to screen Muslim immigrants, which comes in lieu of his prior call to ban them outright. The focus here is the rest of Trump’s speech, which consists largely of shaky facts meant to exaggerate the terrorist threat to the United States, dubious arguments meant to blame President Obama and Hillary Clinton for that threat, self‐congratulation for having taken smarter positions, which requires some invention, plus a touch of his special innuendo.
What’s lacking, unsurprisingly, are new policy proposals. After all his criticism of current U.S. counterterrorism policy, Trump offers a vague rehash of it, plus a desire to be tougher on Muslim immigrants.
The speech begins with a recitation of recent terrorism meant to convey a sense of rising menace, with the Islamic State (ISIS) leading the way. That doesn’t require dishonesty. One can exaggerate danger by selecting scary facts and failing to put them in context. For example, Trump doesn’t say that ISIS has been losing territory, which costs it cachet and recruits. Unsurprisingly, he mentions neither the miniscule odds that an American will be killed by terrorists nor the absence of a major attack organized by ISIS in the United States. The San Bernardino and Orlando shooters cited ISIS as an inspiration but, in its absence, might have acted in the name Qaeda or some other group.
Still, Trump can’t help molding the facts to his story. First, he claims that “this summer, there has been an ISIS attack launched outside the war zones of the Middle East every 84 hours.” That figure comes from a July 31 CNN article, which itself repeats a contractor’s non‐public data covering a period—June 8 until late July—when attacks were unusually frequent. The count seems to include attacks, like the Orlando massacre, where the attacker had solely ideological links to ISIS. Using that broad definition and public lists of ISIS attacks for the period from June 8 until Trump spoke, attacks have come every 136 hours. Counting Orlando, the United States has gone 1560 hours without an ISIS attack.
Second, Trump contends that ISIS is “fully operational in 18 countries with aspiring branches in 6 more.” Trump doesn’t mention that he is directly quoting an NBC news report on a leaked White House briefing from the National Counterterrorism Center. The story doesn’t define “fully operational,” but it can’t mean much. To get 18 nations, one has to count just about every terrorist entity that has endorsed ISIS, though the main outfit in Syria only slightly controls a few of them. Mostly they’re splinter jihadist groups that embraced ISIS’s brand once it eclipsed al Qaeda’s.
Third, Trump argues that a new Congressional report shows that “the administration has downplayed the growth of ISIS, with 40 percent of analysts saying they had experienced efforts to manipulate their findings.” As Politico notes, the report was about analysts at Central Command, not all U.S. intelligence analysts, as Trump implies. Nor do we know that the pressure came from higher administration officials, rather than Centcom leaders, or that their take was entirely misguided, given ISIS’s recent decline.