Donald Trump's Winning the Narrative

The terrorism narrative, which is to say, he talking plainly about terrorism, the way regular people talk about terrorism, especially New Yorkers (who should know a thing or two about terrorism).

From James Robbins, at USA Today, "Trump's winning terrorist narrative":

For more than a year, Donald Trump has been raising an alarm about the upswing of terrorism in the United States, promising to address it head-on without any of Washington’s usual political pieties. Jargon-laden responses to terror attacks from the White House and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign only tend to confirm Trump voters' worst fears about the Washington establishment, rather than build support for the Obama-Clinton approach to fighting the Islamic State terrorist group.

On Saturday a pressure cooker bomb detonated in a Manhattan dumpster, wounding 29. A second device was found blocks away and disarmed. This followed a pipe bombing that morning in Seaside Park, N.J., targeting the Marine Semper Fi 5K fundraising race. Fortunately, only one bomb detonated and no one was harmed.

On Sunday, five bombs were found in a backpack near a train station in Elizabeth, N.J. On Monday one suspected terrorist, Afghan immigrant Ahmad Rahami, was arrested after a shootout with police in Linden.

While all this was playing out on the East Coast, on Saturday a man went on a stabbing rampage at a mall in St. Cloud, Minn., wounding nine people before being gunned down by an off-duty police officer. The assailant, Somali immigrant Dahir Adan, whom ISIL claimed as a “soldier,” asked one of his victims whether he was a Muslim before stabbing him.

Monday morning, White House spokesman Josh Earnest attempted to calm rattled public nerves, saying that “when it comes to ISIL, we are in a fight, a narrative fight with them, a narrative battle.” He assured us we are winning it. Democratic presidential candidate Clinton quickly echoed this line, and accused Trump of giving “aid and comfort” to the terrorists by counseling a get-tough approach against radical Islam that strays from the administration’s more restrained rhetoric.

The White House response that America is successfully challenging ISIL’s "narrative" is cold comfort when improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are blowing up on American streets...

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