There will be blood

No matter what happens with Trump’s dumb travel ban, we’re nearly certain to see another ISIS-inspired attack sometime this year. But that’s not the scary thing. The scary thing is that Trump and Bannon will be absolutely delighted when it happens.

It’s been nearly eight months since the last big incident, in which an American citizen killed 49 people in Orlando. Now, the media ignored the Orlando massacre so you’ve probably never heard of it, but I do recall Trump congratulating himself at the time. He relished “the congrats for being right” about the threat posed by people with Muslim-sounding names.

Not much since then, though. Trump keeps going on about terror and crime and carnage everywhere, but without some real blood in the streets his words ring a little hollow. You can never find a terrorist when you need one.

Trump and Bannon would settle for a few dozen casualties, but what they’d really like is a really spectacular attack, something to stampede public opinion and make it easier for them to seize police-state powers on a permanent basis.

You don’t think that’s Trump’s fondest dream? Imagine if he’d been president on 9/11. Everything he’s done and said for the past year has been the groundwork for just such a moment. He tweets that we should blame judges and courts the next time “something happens.” He and his minions have already proven their preference for rule by decree. Give them one good pretext and it could be the tipping point for the United States as we know it.

Deaths from “terror” attacks in the United States remain statistically insignificant — counting the Orlando massacre, a total of 94 in the last 16 years. We should worry less about terror attacks than a president who would so obviously welcome one.