18 The Nation. October 9, 2017
I
n late march 2016, a series of
powerful bomb blasts killed nearly
three dozen people at the international
airport in Brussels, Belgium, as well as
in a train carriage pulling out of one of
the central city’s busy stations.
Within hours of the atrocity, then–
presidential candidate Donald Trump
had taken to the airwaves and to Twit-
ter. He didn’t make statements expressing moral and
emotional solidarity with the victims and their fami-
lies. Nor did he talk about the extraordinarily com-
plex political and intelligence challenges confronting
multicultural Western societies in the face of the ISIS
attacks. Instead, he used his
platform to proselytize for
torture. Salah Abdeslam,
the recently captured sus-
pect in the previous year’s
Paris attacks, would, said
the presidential hopeful,
have talked “a lot faster with
the torture,” and in doing so
might have spilled the beans
on his confreres in Belgium
before they could launch
their own attacks.Torture had, by that point in the campaign, be-
come Trump’s leitmotif—and he did far more than
applaud the waterboarding sanctioned by George
W. Bush’s administration, as if that weren’t bad
enough. Time and again, Trump urged his crowds
of supporters on by dangling before them the pros-
pect of violence for violence’s sake. Time and again,
he flaunted his contempt for international norms
by embracing torture—the word, for so long taboo,
as much as the deed—as an official policy of state.
And yet he never defined exactly what kind of
state-sponsored torture he was advocating, or ex-
actly what actions he sought to make the courts, the
military, and the general public complicit in.
More than half a millen-
nium ago, as the Spanish
Inquisition gathered steam,
the fanatical grand inquisi-
tor, Tomás de Torquemada,
wrapped himself in the
mantle of faith and declared
that he would torture to
save souls and destroy her-
etics. The Inquisition began
by liberally employing tor-
mento del agua (a technique
the US military and intelli-TRUMP
TRIUMPH
FEAR
AND
THE
OF
IN
AMERICAN POLITICS
by SASHA ABRAMSKY
He demonized entire races and religions and celebrated
torture during the presidential campaign—and still won.LEFT: REUTERS / DAVID BECKER