Big voices in the national media are closing ranks against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in light of the Islamic State’s terrorist attacks in Brussels.
Editorials published almost immediately after the attacks in The New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today warned readers not to listen to Trump, who they say has taken a counterproductive and overly hostile tone on how to fight terrorism.
“Brussels, Europe, the world must brace for a long struggle against this form of terrorism,” said the Times on Tuesday. “That means intensified counterterrorism efforts and a far higher degree of cooperation among threatened nations. That means courage and steadfastness in the face of a threat that will take many years to eliminate. It emphatically does not mean hysterical fear-mongering of the sort promptly voiced by politicians like Donald Trump.”
After the attacks, which are believed to have left more than 30 dead, Trump said the U.S. would need to close its borders to prevent a similar attack.
“I would close up our borders,” Trump said on Fox News. “We are taking in people without real documentation. We don’t know where they’re from or who they are.”
He also repeated prior assertions that he would ask that U.S. intelligence officials use waterboarding and “worse” to gather information from suspected terrorists.
“[S]uch measures only serve the terrorists’ end, which is to weaken Western society by spreading fear and panic, turning citizen against citizen, feeding xenophobic sentiments and further alienating and radicalizing Muslim youths,” the Times said in response.
The Washington Post, referencing Trump’s anti-interventionist views, editorialized that the Brussels attack “is a rebuke to Trump’s foreign policy.”
“Americans believe that this nation’s tradition of religious tolerance, and its history of integrating waves of immigrants into a vast cultural melting pot, makes the U.S. a different and safer place, and they’re largely right,” said a Tuesday editorial in USA Today.
“But a spate of xenophobic rhetoric threatens to undermine that advantage,” it continued. “The most prominent practitioner, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, was all over TV on Tuesday, peddling his usual venom against Muslims — unwittingly helping [the Islamic State] and other extremists sell their own claim that the U.S. and other Western countries hate Muslims and are united in a modern crusade against them.”
James Tarantos, a Wall Street Journal editorial board member, posted a column Tuesday tying the Brussels attacks to Trump’s recently named foreign policy advisers.
Trump’s team, he said, “is by all accounts an unimpressive group. And although some of the common criticisms of Trump strike us as overwrought, the one that does not is that he is sorely — perhaps almost completely — lacking in knowledge of policy substance. We’d feel a lot less uneasy about the prospect of a Trump presidency if we thought his instincts would be tempered by the advice of experts.”
Despite the criticism from the national media, Trump has seen his candidacy for the GOP nomination thrive when he has adopted aggressive positions on terrorism.
It was after similar events in Paris in November that Trump called on the U.S. to temporarily “ban” foreign Muslims. His national poll numbers dramatically increased, with some suspecting it was his “strength” in tone that appealed to his supporters.
