Imagine you were the president of the United States and, annoyed by the incessant nagging of your national security advisors, you decided to put their dire warnings to the test. One effective (although insanely risky) way to do so would be as follows. First, you’d spend four years publicly mocking those advisors while gutting their staffs and stuffing their offices full of loyal but incompetent hacks. Then, during the last two weeks of your term—arguably the most fragile moment in any administration—you’d foment an insurrection that distracts the country’s attention from absolutely everything else, leaving it uniquely vulnerable to attack. And then you’d plop down in front of the TV, skip all your intelligence briefings, and just watch what happened.
Although his motives may have been different, this is pretty much what Donald Trump did during his disastrous four years as president. And the results were, to put it mildly, unexpected—especially given the kinds of warnings we’ve all heard from national security experts over the last 20 years. Between January 2017 and January 2021, the United States suffered only a handful of domestic attacks by Islamist extremists. And none of the country’s main adversaries—Russia, China, or Iran—took advantage of the chaos by making any major violent military moves against it. (Hacking was another story, but it never rose to the level of a kinetic attack or provoked a similar response.)
