What Trump Understood About the War on Terror That Others Missed
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About this episode
Klein talks with national security reporter Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror, about how the policies and politics of the 9/11 era reshaped America itself. Ackerman traces the war on terror's culture of fear — an implicitly racialized, civilizational narrative of existential threat — through birtherism, anti-Sharia campaigns and into Donald Trump's rise, arguing Trump grasped its emotional politics better than the neoconservatives who built it. He details the growth of the surveillance state under the NSA's bulk metadata collection, criticizes Barack Obama for entrenching the 'forever war' through drones and legal process rather than ending it, and warns that the same tools are now pivoting toward a cold war with China.