In the beginning was the lie. And it was a brutally effective one: that the first African American president of the United States wasn’t an American and was born outside of the States, which made him ineligible to be the president. He was also a secret Muslim.
The lie achieved several purposes for the billionaire reality TV show host. First, and above all, it brought Trump what he always craved: attention! The lie also positioned him as a political player. Suddenly Trump was the toast of a growing ecosystem on the right consisting of Fox News and talk radio, and to the right of them, the emerging “alt-right” movement. The lie also played well into American fears of “the Other,” in particular, of Muslims, a fear that could only be understood in the context of the 9/11 attacks, one of the hinge events of American history.
The 9/11 attacks were the backdrop for Trump’s ascension to the presidency. A large majority of Americans considered them the most memorable events of their lives, just as an earlier generation was haunted by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The fear of another 9/11 helped to explain the anxiety that grew up around Muslims in the United States in the years afterward. Just under 60 percent of Republicans polled had negative views of Muslims, and among respondents of all political persuasions, Muslim Americans polled less favorably than Americans of any other faith.
Another poll, from 2015, found that nearly a third of Americans, including almost half of Republicans, believed President Obama to be a Muslim, despite all evidence to the contrary. A virulent minority also believed that Obama was seeking to populate his administration with members of the Muslim Brotherhood as part of a secret plan to bring sharia law to the United States.
Trump’s presidential campaign brought these prejudices and conspiracy theories into the mainstream of American politics. During the campaign, Trump claimed that he had watched “thousands” of Muslims cheering the 9/11 attacks from their rooftops in New Jersey. There was, of course, no evidence for this.
The prejudices that Trump played on were amplified by the rise of ISIS, which took place as his campaign started to gather steam. The story of ISIS’s rise out of the simmering mess of post-invasion Iraq and the wider instability of the Middle East after the Arab Spring was a narrative that Trump would weaponize to great effect.
In 2011, then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton had pushed for US intervention in Libya, and ISIS later gained a significant foothold there following the anarchy that engulfed the country after the fall of the Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi.
The collapse of the Libyan state following the ouster of Qaddafi greatly influenced President Barack Obama’s subsequent approach to Syria, which was to do little. Obama said that the Libyan intervention was the foreign policy decision he most regretted. Clinton proposed a robust plan to combat the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, including a no-fly zone aimed at Assad’s air force, but Obama overruled her.
Obama believed that Iran was going all-in in Syria to prop up their ally Assad and using their proxy force, Hezbollah, which had fought in Lebanon for thirty years, while those who favored arming the “moderate” Syrian opposition were wasting time on a fantasy that involved turning a bunch of carpenters, dentists, and farmers into a major fighting force. And what would happen the day after Assad fell in the unlikely event that he was overthrown? Would it replicate the brutal civil wars in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was deposed, or the chaos in Libya after the fall of Qaddafi? Obama’s view of overseas adventures in the Middle East was best encapsulated in his pungent aphorism “Don’t do stupid shit.”
The rise of ISIS was partly a result of Obama’s unwillingness to intervene in a decisive manner in the Syrian war and also of his haste to disengage from Iraq at the end of 2011, which helped pave the way for a vacuum in the country into which ISIS inserted itself three years later. It was in the chaos of the deepening Syrian civil war that the group that became ISIS was able to gain battlefield experience, which the terrorist army then put to good use in Iraq.
During 2014, seemingly out of nowhere, ISIS’s terrorist army stormed across Syria and Iraq, seizing territory the size of Portugal and lording over some eight million subjects—more than the population of Bulgaria. ISIS declared its caliphate in Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, in July 2014. A month later, the group videotaped its beheading of the American journalist James Foley and broadcast it around the globe. According to a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, the murders of Foley and other American hostages held by ISIS was the most widely followed news story of any kind during the previous five years in the United States. Those murders provoked widespread outrage among Americans.
Trump’s presidential campaign took place during a wave of mass-casualty terrorist attacks in the West directed or inspired by ISIS. On November 13, 2015, ISIS-trained terrorists launched attacks at several locations in Paris, killing 130 people.
The night before the ISIS terrorists attacked in Paris, Trump had addressed a raucous campaign rally in Iowa, where he explained his plan to defeat ISIS: “I have a plan, but I don’t want to tell ISIS what it is. . . . So I was on one of the shows, and I said, ‘ISIS is making a tremendous amount of money because of the oil that they took away, they have some in Syria, they have some in Iraq.’ I would bomb the shit out of them.”
Two weeks after the Paris attacks, sixty miles east of Los Angeles, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, stormed into a holiday party hosted by the San Bernardino County health department. Wearing military-style clothing and black masks and wielding assault rifles, the couple unleashed a barrage of bullets, killing fourteen people. Just before the shootings, Malik had pledged her allegiance to ISIS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in a post on Facebook. She and her husband then carried out what was, at the time, the most lethal terrorist attack in the States since 9/11. Two days after the attacks, an ISIS radio station embraced Farook and Malik as “supporters.”
The massacres in San Bernardino and Paris presented an opportunity for Trump’s campaign to lock up the Republican nomination. Five days after the San Bernardino attack, Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslim immigration to the States. Trump also asserted that many Muslims have “great hatred towards Americans.” Other Republican presidential candidates condemned Trump’s call. Jeb Bush tweeted that Trump was “unhinged,” while Senator Lindsey Graham said that Trump’s rhetoric was “putting our troops serving abroad and our diplomats at risk.”
Bush and Graham had unwittingly stumbled into a well-laid trap. According to Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, “We wanted none of the other candidates to move to the right of us on immigration.” This stratagem worked. Polling in early 2016 showed that half of all Americans supported banning Muslims from traveling to the United States and more than two-thirds of Republican voters supported it. Among Trump supporters, more than 80 percent backed the ban.
Worries about terrorism continued to help propel the Trump campaign during the spring of 2016. Early in the morning of June 12, 2016, a 911 operator in Orlando received a strange call. The caller said, “My name is ‘I pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.’ ” The mysterious caller was Omar Mateen, and this was his way of announcing to the world that he was systematically murdering patrons at Pulse, a nightclub that catered to Orlando’s gay community. During his three-hour rampage, Mateen killed forty-nine and wounded fifty-three people. It was not only the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11, at the time, it was also the deadliest mass shooting in the United States to date.
Later that same morning, Trump tweeted, “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!” This self-congratulatory tweet didn’t mention the many victims of the Orlando massacre.
A day after the Orlando attack, Trump gave a speech in New Hampshire that his campaign billed as a major statement on counterterrorism. Trump renewed his call for a travel ban, saying, “I will suspend immigration from areas of the world where there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe, or our allies.” He also accused Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, of having a plan to bring in hundreds of thousands of refugees every year from the Middle East with “no system to vet them,” a false claim that Trump frequently made during the campaign. In fact, Clinton planned to admit sixty-five thousand Syrian refugees, who were overwhelmingly women and children, out of a total of some five million Syrians who had fled their country. Syrian refugees were already subject to the most intense vetting of any group coming to the United States, a screening process that could take as long as two years.
During a campaign speech in Florida in August, Trump even accused Obama and Clinton of playing on the same team as ISIS: “ISIS will hand her the most valuable player award. Her only competition is Obama, between the two of them.”
During the final months of the presidential campaign, terrorist attacks continued across the West. On July 14, 2016, an ISIS-inspired terrorist in Nice, France, used a truck as a weapon to kill eighty-four people. Two months later Ahmad Khan Rahami of Elizabeth, New Jersey, set off a bomb in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, injuring thirty-one bystanders. ISIS terrorists then killed twenty-six people at Istanbul Airport. All of these attacks received exhaustive TV news coverage.
Many Americans felt threatened by these terrorist attacks, which could occur seemingly anywhere without warning, and Trump channeled their fears far better than any other politician. During the presidential campaign, just over half of Americans said they were “very” or “somewhat” worried that they, or a member of their family, would be victims of terrorism. This was the largest number to feel this way since just after 9/11.
Even though Trump was adept at exploiting the fears that many Americans had about terrorism, he had a major electoral problem compared to Clinton, a former secretary of state, which was his complete lack of experience on the world stage. When Americans elect a president, they are also electing their commander in chief. Could enough Americans really see Trump in that role?
This uncertainty was compounded by the appearance of the “Never Trump” movement. This consisted of more than one hundred Republican national security officials and prominent Republican thinkers who warned that Trump would make an appalling commander in chief. The Never Trumpers were led by Eliot Cohen, who was a senior State Department official in the George W. Bush administration. They published an open letter in early March 2016, charging Trump with being “wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle. He swings from isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence. . . . He is fundamentally dishonest. Evidence of this includes his attempts to deny positions he has unquestionably taken in the past, including on the 2003 Iraq war.” Signatories to the letter included Republican national security heavyweights such as Frances Townsend, George W. Bush’s top counterterrorism adviser; Michael Chertoff, Bush’s secretary of homeland security; and Michael Mukasey, Bush’s attorney general. No other serious contender for the presidency had ever received such a public thrashing from his own party elders.
The Trump campaign realized it had a problem. It needed to get some national security experts on board, and fast. At a meeting with the Washington Post editorial board on March 21, 2016, Trump pulled out a list of his national security advisers, who were revealed to the world for the first time. Trump told the Post editorial board that his team included “Walid Phares, who you probably know, PhD, adviser to the House of Representatives. He’s a counterterrorism expert. Carter Page, PhD. George Papadopoulos. He’s an oil and energy consultant. Excellent guy. The honorable Joe Schmitz, inspector general at the Department of Defense. General Keith Kellogg.”
The reaction that national security experts had to this list was, Huh? It was, at best, a group of figures on the margins and, at worst, a bad joke. Kellogg had commanded the storied Eighty-second Airborne Division, but that was during the pre-9/11 period and he was now long retired. Before he was tapped by the Trump campaign, Kellogg wasn’t doing much of anything. Phares was a Fox News talking head, but he had no experience working in government. Papadopoulos had highlighted his representation of the United States at the Model UN in Geneva in 2012 as one of his achievements on his LinkedIn page. It was the sort of qualification a college student applying for an internship on Capitol Hill might list.
Bannon called Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. “Corey, what the fuck did you just do?”
Lewandowski replied, “Well, we had to put up some names. We’re getting heat.”
Bannon said, “Corey, it’s better not to put up something than to show the world you don’t know anybody. I never heard of most of these clowns. Joe Schmitz, I knew Joe, the IG [inspector general] for the army. This is the biggest guy you’ve got? Fuck.”
The striking absence of serious players on Trump’s national security team and the large number of Republican national security heavyweights who came out as Never Trumpers explained why retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn became so vitally important to the Trump campaign. Unlike anyone else on Trump’s campaign team, Flynn was a genuine war hero, with the blood of the Afghan and Iraq Wars on his hands. If a recently retired three-star general such as Flynn backed Trump, that helped considerably with those voters who were wavering on the commander-in-chief issue. Bannon told Trump, “All we need to do is give people permission to vote for you as commander in chief.”
Trump and Flynn made an unlikely pair. One was the son of a multimillionaire real estate developer from New York City who had avoided service in Vietnam and whose knowledge of the military and national security was close to zero. The other was one of nine children who had grown up in a one-bathroom house in Middletown, Rhode Island, who went on to run intelligence for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which includes the Navy’s SEAL Team Six and the Army’s Delta Force. But Trump and Flynn found common cause in their worries that “radical Islam” was in the ascendant, and they shared a deep contempt for the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton. Flynn also looked the part. Flynn’s aquiline features gave him the air of a Roman senator, and his buzz cut and ramrod bearing were those of a battle-tested officer.
During his military career, few could have predicted the path that Flynn would eventually take. As a colonel in charge of intelligence for JSOC, Flynn was a well-loved, effective team leader and an intensely hardworking officer who deployed constantly to Iraq and Afghanistan. Flynn used to joke that he lived at the JSOC base in Balad, Iraq, and took his vacations at the JSOC base in Bagram, Afghanistan.
Flynn prided himself on being a maverick and an out-of-the-box thinker. His peers found that he would generate ten ideas, nine of which were kind of nutty and one that was absolutely brilliant. In the JSOC environment, Flynn had a team to vet these creative ideas, which was not the case after he left military service.
The hours working for JSOC were brutal—seventeen-hour days every day of the week—but the mission was clear. Flynn and his boss, then-major general Stanley McChrystal, understood by 2005 that the United States was losing the war in Iraq and that JSOC wasn’t configured at all well to destroy the industrial-strength insurgency it was facing, which was led by Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq wasn’t a traditional military opponent operating with a top-down bureaucratic hierarchy, but rather was a loose network of like-minded jihadists. McChrystal’s mantra became “It takes a network to defeat a network.” To become a network, JSOC would have to get much flatter and more agile, not qualities often associated with the bureaucratic hierarchy prevalent in the US military. McChrystal and Flynn reconfigured JSOC so it communicated more seamlessly with all the components of the intelligence community and it also more quickly processed the intelligence gathered on raids so other raids could be immediately launched based on what was gleaned from the initial operation. The results were startling; JSOC went from doing only a handful of raids a month to doing hundreds of raids every month. Al-Qaeda in Iraq took a huge beating.
When McChrystal was tapped by Obama in 2009 to run the war in Afghanistan, he flew into the country with now-major general Mike Flynn, whom he had selected to be his top “intel” officer. Also on the same flight was Colonel Charlie Flynn, Mike Flynn’s brother, whom McChrystal had appointed to be his executive officer.
The McChrystal team agreed to a request from a Rolling Stone reporter, Michael Hastings, to do a story about their work. Hastings spent months profiling McChrystal and his team in Afghanistan. When the article finally appeared under the headline “The Runaway General,” it was studded with unflattering, anonymous quotes about Obama’s cabinet by members of McChrystal’s staff.
Obama immediately summoned McChrystal back to Washington. Obama felt strongly that President George W. Bush had given a blank check to the military and to officers such as General David Petraeus when he was the commander in Iraq. He also felt that the military had boxed him in early in his first term by leaking a tightly held assessment overseen by McChrystal that described the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. Obama felt that the leaked assessment had helped to force his hand to send tens of thousands of additional troops to the country. Obama wanted to send a clear message that the civilians were now back in control of the Pentagon.
The Flynn brothers were watching TV together in Kabul on June 23, 2010, as Obama walked out of the White House to the Rose Garden to make an announcement. Obama said that he had just accepted McChrystal’s resignation. The brothers were stunned. Charlie and Mike Flynn both revered McChrystal; they had fought in combat together and they had buried soldiers together. Mike Flynn and his wife, Lori, had recently celebrated Stan and Annie McChrystal’s thirty-third wedding anniversary on a rare night off in Paris. Flynn was a registered Democrat, but the firing of his friend and mentor sparked his increasing disenchantment with the Obama administration.
Three years later, after tours at CENTCOM and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Flynn, now promoted to lieutenant general, was appointed to run the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Pentagon officials who had worked with Flynn admired his passion when he was a colonel in JSOC, but were concerned about his propensity to flit from subject to subject in a superficial manner. One of them warned colleagues at DIA that they should “buy neck braces” because Flynn was going to swivel from one topic to another topic in meetings and he wasn’t going to be an effective manager.
Flynn wanted to turn DIA into something more like JSOC, with more of its officials deployed “forward” in the war zones. This was an excellent idea; after all, if you were supposed to be providing intelligence on a war, it would help if you were not working in an office six thousand miles away from where the conflict was actually happening.
The DIA desk jockeys pushed back against Flynn and his plans to deploy many of them to the war zones. DIA wasn’t JSOC. Unlike JSOC, whose soldiers and sailors had to follow orders, DIA was a largely civilian organization. DIA was also a bureaucratic behemoth of some seventeen thousand employees that was ten times larger than JSOC. Most DIA employees were quite content living in the Washington, DC, area as opposed to, say, working at Bagram Air Base in the windswept, mountainous deserts of central Afghanistan.
Flynn had never commanded a giant organization like DIA. The first rule of bureaucratic politics is if you want to make big changes, you need to enlist folks to help, and Flynn didn’t make much of an effort to do that at DIA, which ruffled bureaucratic feathers and irritated his bosses at the Pentagon and in the intelligence community.
At DIA, Flynn also began developing some eccentric notions. Flynn became convinced that the jihadist attack against the US consulate in Benghazi in Libya in 2012 in which four Americans were killed was orchestrated by Iran. On the face of it this made little sense since the Shia regime in Iran rarely cooperated with Sunni militants. There was also no evidence for this fanciful notion, but Flynn pushed his analysts at DIA to find a link. Flynn’s failure to distinguish between conjecture and truth led analysts at DIA to coin the term “Flynn facts.”
Flynn also became convinced that the Obama national security team was only selectively publicly releasing documents recovered in the May 2011 SEAL raid at the Pakistani compound where Osama bin Laden was killed. Flynn thought that the Obama team was only releasing those documents that portrayed al-Qaeda and its affiliates as on the ropes and was not releasing documents that showed that leaders of al-Qaeda were living in Iran.
In fact, there was a more prosaic reason for the disclosures that were made and when they were made, according to the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Nick Rasmussen, who served in that role for both President Obama and President Trump: if any of the documents still had some operational utility to the CIA, they were not released.
When Flynn was running DIA, the Obama administration’s view of the terrorism threat was best encapsulated by Obama’s statement to New Yorker editor David Remnick in January 2014 that the group that would evolve into ISIS was merely a “jayvee” team.
Flynn had a far less sanguine view, warning that the global jihadist movement was not waning in the wake of bin Laden’s death, as was then the conventional analysis. Flynn made this case publicly in congressional testimony on February 11, 2014. Oklahoma Republican senator James Inhofe asked him if al-Qaeda was indeed on the run, as the Obama administration was claiming.
“They are not,” testified Flynn.
A few months later, Flynn made a similar public statement at the Aspen Security Forum, a conference held annually in July in the pleasant, green mountains of Aspen, Colorado, that attracted top US national security officials and the journalists who covered them, all happy to have fled the sweltering swamp of Washington, DC, at the height of summer.
CNN’s Evan Perez asked Flynn, “Are we safer today than we were two years, five years, ten years ago?”
“My quick answer is we’re not,” Flynn replied.
Flynn went on to say that focusing only on the declining fortunes of “core” al-Qaeda, the group that had attacked the States on 9/11, was to gloss over the fact that jihadist ideology was in fact “exponentially growing.”
As ISIS conquered much of Iraq during the summer of 2014 and imposed its brutal totalitarian rule, it was clear that Obama and his national security team had underestimated the strength of ISIS, while Flynn had understood the threat better than many of his peers. But Flynn had angered his two bosses, Michael Vickers, the overall head of intelligence at the Pentagon, and James Clapper, the director of national intelligence. Vickers and Clapper thought that Flynn’s efforts at trying to shake things up at DIA were sabotaging morale at the agency. They decided to force Flynn out of office a year early. Vickers summoned Flynn to his Pentagon office, where he was joined by Clapper; together they told Flynn he had to go. Flynn understood that when you are a general officer and your civilian bosses tell you it’s over, you salute and move on.
Flynn was bitter and embarrassed about the way he had been fired. In his own mind, he was forced out because he wasn’t playing along with the Obama administration line that the war on terror was largely over. For Vickers and Clapper, it was much simpler: they fired him because he was a bad manager. Either way, Flynn, a highly decorated officer with thirty-three years of service in the army, much of it in special operations, at the age of fifty-five had his career abruptly terminated, and in an inglorious manner to boot.
Perhaps by way of compensation, once he was out in the civilian world, Flynn aimed to be a rainmaker. Flynn set up Flynn Intel Group, which took on all manner of clients. Out of some combination of naiveté and arrogance, Flynn, the maverick who came out of the insular world of Joint Special Operations Command, did not play by the rules when it came to the lobbying work he did for his foreign clients, for which he was supposed to register as an agent of a foreign government.
Flynn also began dipping his toe into politics. In August 2015, what was supposed to be a half-hour meeting with Trump turned into a ninety-minute discussion. Flynn came away deeply impressed. He found Trump to be a good listener who asked smart questions and seemed truly worried about the direction that the country was heading.
Flynn became a prominent presence on the Trump campaign and a vocal critic of Obama’s supposedly “weak” policies on ISIS. This, of course, dovetailed very neatly with what Trump was saying. Flynn’s support of Trump was all the more important because he was the only person on Trump’s campaign team with any battlefield experience of America’s post-9/11 wars grinding on at various levels of intensity in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.
Like Trump, Flynn thought that the United States could work with Putin and sat next to the Russian president at a black-tie gala dinner in Moscow in December 2015 that celebrated the tenth anniversary of Russia Today (RT), the Kremlin-sponsored TV network, an appearance for which Flynn was handsomely paid. Flynn later said that he wasn’t paid by the Russians for the speech. This was true only in a jesuitical sense because the Russians paid Flynn’s speaking agency, which deducted its standard commission and then paid Flynn $33,750.
Flynn also sat down for an interview with an RT anchor and critiqued Obama’s plan to defeat ISIS. Flynn later told a Washington Post reporter that this wasn’t a big deal as RT was similar to CNN, a bizarre claim given that RT was effectively an arm of the Kremlin.
In the spring of 2016, Trump started to seriously consider Flynn to be his running mate. The three-star general would certainly help on the commander-in-chief issue. At the time, the leading candidates to be Trump’s running mate were former House Speaker Newt Gingrich,[*] New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and Flynn. Indiana governor Mike Pence was seen as only a distant possibility for the number two slot on the ticket.
Flynn made his major debut on the public stage when he made a fiery speech of support for Trump at the Republican convention in Cleveland on July 19, 2016. Flynn angrily charged Obama and Clinton with endangering the United States and even lying about the nature of the terrorist threat: “Tonight, Americans stand as one with strength and confidence to overcome the last eight years of the Obama-Clinton failures such as bumbling indecisiveness, willful ignorance, and total incompetence. . . . Because Obama chose to conceal the actions of terrorists like Osama bin Laden and groups like ISIS, and the role of Iran in the rise of radical Islam, Americans are at a loss to fully understand the enormous threat they pose against us.”
As he spoke, Flynn led the crowd in chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” and incited them to “Get fired up! This is about this country!”
Flynn declared, “I have called on Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race because she put our nation’s security at extremely high risk with her careless use of a private email server.”
The crowd started chanting, “Lock her up! Lock her up!”
Hesitating only slightly, Flynn added his voice to the chants, declaring, “Lock her up, that’s right! Damn right, exactly right. And you know why we’re saying that? We’re saying that because if I, a guy who knows this business, if I did a tenth of what [Clinton] did, I would be in jail today.”
Generals who had served with Flynn were dismayed by this performance, which went against their code not to take such clearly partisan positions, even in retirement. McChrystal watched Flynn on a TV monitor at an airport. McChrystal had heard what Flynn was saying at Trump’s rallies, but now, watching Flynn at the convention rail against Clinton with such a level of vitriol, it felt like his old companion-in-arms had crossed a Rubicon in front of a large, national TV audience. The angry man onstage didn’t seem like the Mike Flynn that McChrystal knew so well. A SEAL Team Six officer who had served with Flynn watched Flynn’s performance with a similar mix of shock, confusion, and dismay.
Some of his peers felt Flynn had succumbed to a case of “Obama derangement syndrome” after he was fired from running the Defense Intelligence Agency. That might have been a partial explanation for Flynn’s impassioned rhetoric against Obama and Clinton, but it is also clear that in the years after he was pushed out of the military, Flynn became increasingly enamored of leading neoconservatives as well as right-wing conspiracy theories.
Flynn coauthored a book, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies, with Michael Ledeen, an academic who was a longtime, bitter critic of the Iranian regime. In Field of Fight, which was published just before the 2016 Republican convention, Flynn claimed that the United States was in a “world war” with “radical Islam,” a war that “we’re losing,” that could last “several generations,” and he asserted that “political correctness forbids us to denounce radical Islamists.” Flynn also claimed that American Islamists were trying to create “an Islamic state right here at home” by pushing to “gain legal standing for Sharia.” Flynn cited no evidence for this claim, which was a common right-wing conspiracy theory.
Flynn also wrote for the New York Post about a supposed “enemy alliance” that included Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela, as well as al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban. This was George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” on steroids and even less convincing since ISIS and Iran were at war, as were al-Qaeda and ISIS, and none of these terrorist groups had any relationship with the North Koreans or with the leftist regimes in Latin America.
Flynn became increasingly gripped by conspiracy theories. In August 2016, Flynn claimed in a speech that Democratic members of the Florida legislature were trying to install sharia law in their state. This was nonsense. Flynn also tweeted that fear of Muslims was “rational,” and in another speech Flynn said that Islam was really a “political ideology” rather than a religion. When he was in uniform, Flynn had never made these kinds of assertions about Muslims and Islam.
Flynn’s inability to distinguish easily between facts and obvious falsehoods seemed to worsen as the presidential campaign went on. Flynn claimed in a radio interview in August 2016 that there were Arabic signs along the United States–Mexico border to guide potential terrorists into the States and that he had seen evidence of these signs. Flynn said, “I have personally seen the photos of the signage along those paths that are in Arabic. They’re like waypoints along that path as you come in. Primarily, in this case the one that I saw was in Texas and it’s literally, it’s like signs, that say, in Arabic, ‘this way, move to this point.’ It’s unbelievable.” It was unbelievable because it was completely false.
Flynn’s son Michael, who was Flynn’s chief of staff during the presidential campaign, passed on false news on Twitter that claimed that Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, were running a child sex ring out of the basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in northwest Washington, DC.
This patently absurd story prompted twenty-eight-year-old Edgar Welch of Salisbury, North Carolina, to travel to Washington to “self-investigate.” On December 5, 2016, Welch walked into the popular pizza restaurant carrying an assault rifle and started firing shots. He pointed the firearm in the direction of a restaurant employee, who fled and called the police, which arrested Welch in short order. Welch told investigators that he had come armed to help rescue the abused children. He also told a reporter, with masterful understatement, “the intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.”
After the shooting incident, Michael Flynn Jr. tweeted, “Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it’ll remain a story. The left seems to forget #PodestaEmails and the many ‘coincidences’ tied to it.” This proved too much for the Trump team and the younger Flynn was quietly fired.
During the campaign, Flynn forged a strong connection with the TV pundit Sebastian Gorka. Of British-Hungarian extraction, Gorka styled himself an “irregular warfare strategist.” It was never clear what this meant as the only wars that Gorka fought in were on television, as a frequent, bombastic guest on Fox News. Gorka’s full goatee, three-piece suits, and braying English accent gave him the look and feel of a villain from a Victorian melodrama.[*]
Gorka insisted on being called “Dr. Gorka” because of his doctorate from Corvinus University, a college in Hungary so obscure that it didn’t appear on US News & World Report’s list of the 1,250 universities that it tracked around the world. Gorka’s PhD about terrorism would never have been granted at an American university because it was a glorified clip job with no original research. Per Google Scholar, which tracks all citations of work by scholars—the currency of the realm in academia—no expert has ever cited Gorka’s PhD on terrorism. Compare this to the work of terrorism scholar Marc Sageman, who published the book Understanding Terror Networks three years before Gorka published his PhD: other experts have cited Sageman’s book more than three thousand times.
Gorka submitted his dissertation under the name Sebestyén L. v. Gorka. The “v.” was a nod to the fact that Gorka was associated with the Vitézi Rend, a Hungarian far-right group that was aligned with the Nazis during World War II. Despite Gorka’s association with such a group, which could have led him to be denied entry to the United States by immigration authorities, Gorka subsequently secured a post teaching at Marine Corps University. Thomas A. Saunders III, a major Republican donor, funded his chair there. It later emerged that Saunders and Gorka were related by marriage, although Saunders claimed he didn’t intervene in Gorka’s hiring.
The FBI funneled more than $100,000 to Gorka’s consulting firm between 2012 and 2016 for counterterrorism training he gave FBI employees, but the bureau abruptly terminated the arrangement when FBI officials determined that Gorka’s classes included diatribes against Muslims, whom he described as either already radicalized or soon to be radicalized. Gorka also left a post at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, a branch of the Pentagon, that hosted many foreign midcareer military officers who would go on to become generals in their home countries. Officials at the National Defense University felt that Gorka’s views about Muslims did not represent the US military and government well.
During the fall of 2015, Gorka wrote position papers for the Trump team about terrorism, for which he was paid $8,000. Gorka also published a book during the campaign that sounded many of the same themes as Flynn’s Field of Fight and echoed some of Trump’s positions on terrorism. Gorka’s book, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, was not much more than a pamphlet that bizarrely reprinted both the entire text of George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram,” which provided much of the intellectual basis for the strategy of containment of the Soviet Union, as well as the text of NSC-68, the Truman administration’s blueprint for how to roll back the Soviets, as if to suggest that Gorka was providing a similar, groundbreaking blueprint for defeating jihadism.
Defeating Jihad also made spurious claims, such as that Saddam Hussein had operational ties to al-Qaeda, a claim that had been exhaustively debunked by the Senate Intelligence Committee following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Gorka also claimed that ISIS posed “a direct existential threat to America and the whole of Western civilization.” Two years after the publication of Gorka’s book, that existential threat to the West was largely out of business. Gorka also advocated for vague measures such as fighting an “ideological war” against ISIS without saying how exactly that would be accomplished.
The books by Flynn and Gorka were long on slogans and short on solutions, but both men made frequent appearances on TV and on social media amplifying one of Trump’s core messages, that the United States was purportedly losing the war against the terrorists because Obama and Clinton wouldn’t name the enemy as “radical Islam” because of their “political correctness,” and that by failing to do so they were doomed to wage an ineffective war against ISIS and similar groups.
Obama responded to this line of argument by saying that his administration had made a great deal of progress against ISIS. While Obama’s administration was slow to recognize the rising ISIS threat, during the summer of 2014 it had surged on the problem with a vengeance. According to Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland, who was the ground commander for the fight against ISIS under Obama’s watch, by August 2016, five months before Obama stepped down as president, the US-led coalition had killed an estimated forty-five thousand ISIS fighters. Also, Obama asserted that expressly linking the religion of Islam with terrorism was counterproductive and actually helped ISIS’s narrative that the United States was engaged in a “war against Islam.”
One of the strangest episodes of the strangest of presidential campaigns was the furor surrounding the Gold Star Khan family. Humayun Khan was a Muslim American captain in the US Army who was killed by a car bomb in Iraq in 2004. Khan was posthumously awarded a Bronze Star for bravery because he shielded his fellow soldiers from the blast. His father, Khizr Khan, made a rousing speech memorializing his son at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia on July 28, 2016.
With his wife standing beside him wearing a blue headscarf, Khan said, “If it was up to Donald Trump, [Humayun] never would have been in America. Donald Trump consistently smears the character of Muslims. . . . Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery? Go look at the graves of the brave patriots who died defending America—you will see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities.”
Brandishing a copy of the Constitution, Khan addressed Trump directly, charging, “You have sacrificed nothing. And no one.”
Trump wasn’t going to take this lying down, even if the target of his ire was a Gold Star dad and mom who would surely always hold the moral high ground in a contest in which it was well known that he had taken five deferments from serving in the Vietnam War. Trump had even joked with Howard Stern on his radio show that his own personal Vietnam was avoiding contracting a venereal disease when he was playing the field during the eighties. Bronze Star–level heroism this surely was not.
On ABC News, Trump claimed that Khizr Khan had delivered the speech because his wife had been silenced, saying, “If you look at his wife, she was standing there, she had nothing to say, she probably—maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say, you tell me.”
In fact, Mrs. Khan didn’t speak because she was so overcome by emotion when she saw a giant photograph of her son on a TV screen at the convention.
During his ABC News interview, Trump went on to say that he had made his own sacrifices to the country: “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I’ve worked very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs.”
Comparing the sacrifice of losing a son in combat to building a business that he had inherited from his enormously wealthy father was jarring for many Americans, who were horrified by this attack on a Gold Star family. Trump didn’t apologize.
A week after Trump had his spat with the Khans, a second public letter appeared from the Never Trumpers and it was even harsher than the first. John Bellinger III, a product of St. Albans, Princeton, and Harvard Law School who had served as the legal adviser both to George W. Bush’s National Security Council and the Bush State Department, took the lead in recruiting key members of the Republican establishment to sign on to a letter decrying Trump.
Bellinger’s family had a long record of public service; his father was an army officer and his mother a CIA analyst, while Bellinger himself had worked in government beginning in the Reagan administration. Bellinger had stewed about Trump since the fall of 2015, growing increasingly concerned about his verbal attacks on Muslims and his musings that the family members of terrorists should be killed.
Trump’s view contrasted with that of Bellinger’s former boss, President George W. Bush, who had visited the main mosque in Washington, DC, a week after the 9/11 attacks and had declared there, “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.”
Bellinger wrote a letter stating that if elected, Trump “would be the most reckless president in American history” and “would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.” He then recruited senior Republicans to join him in signing the letter.
At the annual summer meeting of the Aspen Strategy Group in Aspen, Colorado, Steve Hadley, George W. Bush’s national security adviser, argued to fellow Republicans gathered there that signing this letter would be a mistake because it would play into the hands of Trump supporters campaigning against the foreign policy elite. Signatories would also be eliminating their ability to serve in or influence a Trump administration should candidate Trump be elected president.
In the end, fifty leading Republicans signed the letter, which included many of the signatories of the first Never Trump letter, while additional national security heavyweights also added their names such as General Michael Hayden, who was George W. Bush’s CIA director.
The same month that the second Never Trump letter appeared, Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort was forced to resign when a story in the New York Times revealed he had secretly taken millions of dollars from a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician. Trump was now down seven percentage points from Clinton in the polls with only three months before Americans cast their votes. The Trump campaign looked like it was in a death spiral.
Into the vacuum left by Manafort’s abrupt departure stepped Steve Bannon, who would run the campaign for the next three months until Election Day. Bannon had served in the navy and his daughter was a graduate of West Point who had served in Iraq. His first piece of advice to Trump was to stop picking fights with the Khan family. Waging a war with a Gold Star dad and mom was unseemly; their son was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Trump agreed with Bannon, saying, “We’re going to move on to another topic.”
Every September, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) brings pretty much every head of state and foreign minister from around the world to Manhattan. At first, Bannon was reluctant to have Trump attend UNGA on the basis that he only had to make one fuckup—Trump didn’t know the name of an obscure foreign leader—and the media was going to jump on him for being unprepared. But then Bannon learned that Clinton was planning to take off valuable time from the campaign trail to go to Manhattan for several days to attend UNGA and hold court there with a variety of foreign leaders as the presumptive president of the United States.
Bannon said, “Fuck, this is not going to look good. They’re all going to sit there going ‘She’s fabulous.’ And Trump is a reality TV guy running around Ohio.”
In the end, Trump went to UNGA and met with foreign leaders such as Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu to burnish his image as a possible commander in chief.
Bannon counseled Trump not to worry about what the media was portraying as the death spiral of his campaign, telling him that the two most significant polling numbers were actually working in his favor: “Don’t forget two-thirds of the country still thinks we’re on the wrong track. Seventy percent of the American people for the first time think that the country is in decline and this is the key point; the working class and middle class will follow someone they think will turn America towards its former greatness. Voters liked Obama, but they didn’t think he delivered the change the country needed.” [*]
Bannon continued, “All we’re going to do starting tomorrow is we’re going to compare and contrast Clinton as a representative of a corrupt and incompetent elite and you are the tribune of the people. You are the spokesman for the country, the little guy. And we’re just going to compare and contrast how venal she is and how corrupt the Clintons are and also her warmongering foreign policy.”
Bannon explained that the Trump campaign would stay relentlessly on message around three themes: “Number one, we’re going to stop massive illegal immigration and limit legal immigration to get our sovereignty back and protect our workers. Number two, we’re going to bring manufacturing jobs back from China. And number three, we’re going to get out of these pointless foreign wars. That’s the mantra.”
Trump didn’t need much prodding about any of these topics. They were among the key issues that he hammered repeatedly on the campaign trail, both before and after Bannon’s arrival as his campaign manager.
Exit polling during the presidential election found that terrorism was one of the top four issues that voters cared about. Many voters clearly trusted that what Trump termed his “secret plan” to defeat ISIS trumped Hillary Clinton’s many years of experience as secretary of state.
That Mike Flynn never really expected Trump to win the election was strongly suggested by an article he wrote that appeared in The Hill newspaper the morning after Trump’s election triumph. In it, Flynn compared Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric living in exile in Pennsylvania, to Ayatollah Khomeini. For the government of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Gulen was an obsession. It had fingered Gulen for purportedly masterminding a botched military coup in Turkey in the summer of 2016. Flynn’s article suggested that Gulen, who had very good reasons to fear for his safety if he ever returned to Turkey, should not be allowed to remain in the United States.
No one who really expected that he would be the next US national security adviser would have published a provocative piece in a relatively obscure publication the same day that his candidate was just elected to the most powerful job in the world. The article also was likely to draw attention to the fact that Flynn’s consulting firm had been paid more than half a million dollars by a company close to the Erdogan government. Flynn hadn’t registered as an agent of a foreign government as required by law, which was an issue of particular significance for retired senior military officers. And Flynn’s alignment with the Turks seemed to affect his policy choices. During the presidential transition, Flynn had pushed back against a plan that the Obama administration was developing to partner with Kurdish forces in Syria to fight ISIS. This was also the position of the Turks, who opposed the United States partnering with Kurdish forces that they regarded as terrorists.
Two days after Trump was elected president, Obama sat down with Trump in the Oval Office and warned him that the biggest national security problem he would face was the mercurial, nuclear-armed regime of North Korea. Obama also warned Trump against hiring Flynn in any senior role. A week after meeting with Obama, Trump offered Flynn the key job of national security adviser. He would not be in the position long.