by Harold Hyman, Franco-American journalist
Donald Trump presents himself as the most original president in history. Above all, he wants to have nothing in common with George W. Bush, who, in his view, was responsible for the most idiotic of wars. Yet the two presidencies, almost a generation apart, have striking similarities. Each injected external danger into domestic considerations. Military and nationalist adventure also made an appearance. Under George W. Bush, the adventure was the war of invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan — he and his neo-conservative entourage even contemplated continuing their victorious march into Syria and Iran. With Donald Trump, it was and still is the passion for an unbridled America, both expansionist (Greenland, Panama) and nostalgic (a return to the Golden Age).
There are other similarities too. The current American political climate, both internally and externally, is a kind of reiteration of the climate that prevailed under the presidency of George W. Bush after 11 September 2001. On the domestic front, there is first and foremost the use of the police to hunt down certain presumed enemies of the nation. The Bush administration introduced the Patriot Act, an emergency law allowing the arrest and imprisonment without charge of any non-citizen suspected by the Department of Homeland Security of posing a terrorist risk. This risk was assessed at administrative level, with a simple judicial stamp. Abuses, and above all fear, were the hallmarks of the time. Foreign visitors, even those with valid visas, were stopped in the middle of a Washington street. This was the case of a delegation of Pakistani researchers, invited by an American think-tank, who were detained for hours by the FBI and finally released by the State Department!
At the moment, Trump is punishing universities for their anti-Semitism, one could almost say their simple Arabophilia. Departments of research on the Arab world, and Palestine in particular, are being investigated and their federal funding suspended or terminated altogether. It’s a return to the post 11 September 2001 climate, very similar in this respect, but less intense because the State of Israel was not threatened at the time. Professors and researchers feared that any statement or study hostile to the Iraq war would lead to them losing their funding. Then, as now, it was enough for just a few individuals or institutes to be deprived of funding to have a chilling effect on everyone.
Finally, George W. Bush was an enemy of the ultra-right. Ultra-right militias and revolutionary groups were severely repressed, largely by the FBI. Whether through the action of the federal police, or because radical right-wing extremists were able to discreetly enlist in the ranks of the American army in Iraq and Afghanistan, to expend their energies. The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 saw ultra-rightists go on the attack against the federal state, which they saw as the agent of a worldwide anti-Christian Zionist plot. Two of them blew up the big federal building in Oklahoma City in the middle of the working day, killing 168 people and injuring 700. Bush continued Bill Clinton’s work and crushed this variety of terrorism.
The attackers on the Capitol on 6 January 2021, admittedly a long way from being Oklahoma City-style terrorists, used violence in large numbers and still received a general pardon from Donald Trump in the early days of his second presidency. As if they were pure civic patriots. On the other hand, he relies heavily on a federal police force called ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which lacks the investigative skills and legal discernment so typical of the FBI — Trump hates the latter for setting him up in 2016, as he believes. So, to arrest Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, ICE was used. Khalil was on a valid visa, but had been visible during the pro-Palestinian protests at the same university, as had other students in similar cases, all arrested by ICE, and incarcerated without clear legal recourse.
Of course, American citizens do not fear arrest for taking a pro-Palestinian stance. As under Bush, they are safe. However, the situation has changed: the Iraq war (2003-2006) had no link whatsoever with Israel, or with Jews in general, whereas the war in Gaza does. The Trump administration has drawn an equivalence between two groups: pro-Palestinians and anti-Semites. The latter come from what Donald Trump calls ‘the radical left’ and woke. Some cases have been confirmed, but most of the demonstrators are in no way members of extremist groups. The President and his ministers denounce them all the same, which creates a climate of a state of siege, fortunately without the reality of a state of siege. Paradoxically, Bush is now seen as the antithesis of Trump, but this view does not take into account the historical similarities described above. Finally, if Donald Trump succeeded in stopping the war in Gaza and also Iran’s nuclear programme, this state of siege would fade in the collective memory. He would be forgiven.
