In a little over two months, Donald Trump – after his shocking victory last night – will control a vast, unaccountable national security and military apparatus unparalleled in world history. The nightmare that civil libertarians have warned of for years has now tragically come true: instead of dismantling the surveillance state and war machine, the Obama administration and Democrats institutionalised it – and it will soon be in the hands of a maniac.
It will go down in history as perhaps President Obama’s most catastrophic mistake.
The Obama administration could have prosecuted torturers and war criminals in the Bush administration and sent an unmistakable message to the world: torture is illegal and unconscionable. Instead the president said they would “look forward, not backward”, basically turning a clear felony into a policy dispute. Trump has bragged that he will bring back torture – waterboarding and “much worse”. He has talked about killing the innocent family members of terrorists, openly telling the world he will commit war crimes.
Now that Trump will take the reins of our various Middle East wars in January, who’s going to stop him from following through on his heinous proposals?
Obama promised to close the stain on our Bill of Rights known as Guantánamo prison in his first week in office. Yet to this day, it remains open, with dozens of prisoners still in legal limbo after being held without charge for almost 15 years. Not only has Trump pledged to keep it open, he has said he is “fine” with sending US citizens arrested on US soil to face unconstitutional military commissions.
Obama, who once campaigned against government secrecy and the NSA’s mass spying powers, instead entrenched the agency’s incredible surveillance apparatus when he came into office and then defended it in the face of the Snowden revelations. Modest changes were enacted due to public pressure, but the surveillance state as we know it remains.
The argument went: yes, we have these powers that are almost exclusively exercised in complete secrecy, but they are only used judiciously. “Trust us,” they said.
Now the president’s ability to potentially spy on countless Americans who are suspected of no crime is in the hands of a person who has already been accused of listening to the phone calls of his own employees, and who the New York Times said just this week, “privately muses about all the ways he will punish his enemies after election day”. Trump has even previously said, in response to a question about the ability to hack his political enemies: “I wish I had that power. Man, that would be power.”
The Bush administration’s secret and unaccountable CIA drone programme has only been further entrenched under the Obama administration. It has dropped bombs in more than half a dozen countries, and even asserted the legal authority to kill US citizens abroad without due process. At the same time, the White House – with the help of a spineless House of Representatives and Senate – has dramatically expanded the president’s authority to unilaterally wage war all over the world without Congress having declared war, as the constitution requires. Trump, who has promised to “bomb the shit out of” Middle East countries and can be goaded into fits of rage by any perceived slight, will soon be in control of that awesome power as well.
Perhaps worse, Trump will also be in charge of a terrifying nuclear arsenal, which he alone can activate. While the blame for continuing to sit on a large nuclear stockpile that could destroy the world traces back generations, Obama promised to work towards a nuclear-free world, yet has shrunk the US arsenal less than any modern president. He was also rebuffed by his entire national security team when he proposed even modest changes to the system a few months ago.
What horrors are in store for us during the reign of President Trump is anyone’s guess, but he will have all the tools at his disposal to wreak havoc on our rights here at home and countless lives of those abroad. We should have seen this coming, and we should have put in place the safeguards to limit the damage.
And now it might be too late.