Op-Ed: The White House Has Been Creating a False Narrative About Terrorism

In the past weeks, President Donald Trump and his White House staff have created a highly exaggerated, often false and generally misleading narrative in an attempt to heighten public concern about terrorism at home and abroad.

In the course of the first month of his presidency, Trump and his staff have controversially claimed that the media doesn’t adequately cover terrorist acts, continually stated that the public should be very concerned about terrorist threats, and spoke about three separate terrorist attacks that simply did not happen. I do not think it is ethical to mislead or manipulate the American people in this way in order to facilitate political action.

It is easy to make inferences as to why an administration would want to the public to more concerned about terrorism than they usually are, especially an administration that has consistently attempted to make bold, unprecedented executive action pertaining to immigration, deportation and general national security.

However, Trump’s own rhetoric is often intended to inspire fear, and create a desire for tighter national security. His continued use of ethnic slang like “bad hombres” and his insistent use of the catch phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” start to sound even a little xenophobic after awhile.

Now this somewhat alarmist attitude would make more sense if it were backed up by facts or any substantial anecdotal evidence. However the arguments the White House has made that back this sentiment up simply aren’t substantial.

The backbone of this stance by the administration was a document listing 78 terrorist attacks starting in 2014 that the White House felt went under-reported. However, this list included dozens of attacks that were extensively covered on multiple media outlets, some of which won journalistic awards for their coverage of the attacks. And beyond that, a large portion of the attacks on the list were not in the United States, and only a small portion had more than a few targets or victims.

Beyond that, President Trump, his Press Secretary Sean Spicer and counselor Kellyanne Conway have all separately cited different terrorist attacks that simply didn’t happen. First Conway mentioned a “Bowling Green Massacre” that never happened. Spicer then mentioned an Atlanta attack multiple times in his press briefings, also completely unfounded. Then most recently Trump himself mentioned a terrorist attack in Sweden, which was again, completely fabricated.

This all exemplifies the concept of the mean world syndrome. The administration appears to be attempting to manipulate the public into believing the world is a much scarier place than it is, in order to facilitate the drastic isolationist and nationalist measures the administration appears to be moving towards.

This sort of media and narrative manipulation is clearly not in good faith of the American people or its system of government. When you also consider the administrations already adversarial attitude toward the media, it becomes seriously alarming.