Friday on MS NOW’s “On the Line,” New York Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker said Americans are now more afraid of each other than they are of foreign terrorists.
Baker said, “If you had asked anybody on 9/12 what the likelihood was that there would be a repeat mass-scale-casualty kind of attack on the American homeland within the next few months, much less years, most people would have said, yes, that seems pretty likely. And the fact that it didn’t happen owes to the work of an awful lot of people on both sides of the aisle. President Bush, President Obama, the people who work for them, and members of Congress, and the generals and the CIA and so forth. But over time, of course, the fear faded and our politics changed. When Donald Trump runs for office in 2016, he doesn’t go to a mosque, as President Bush talked about there. He talks about banning all Muslims from the country. He sends a very different message, and it’s one that plays into the polarization of our moment.”
He added, “As John Meacham so eloquently put, the last time we came together was that time 25 years ago and we haven’t seen that kind of unity since. And today, if you look at the polls, what we see is that Americans today are more afraid of each other than they are of foreign threats. Right. That poll by Reuters/Ipsos that came out this week showed that by a 2 to 1 margin when asked, which ideological threat do you think is greater to the Americans today? By 2 to 1, they said domestic terrorism over foreign terrorism. And we’ve seen that in the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist. We saw that in the murder of the the Minnesota state legislator, in the attack on the Capitol on January 6, in attacks on synagogues, and so forth. So we’re at a time where the nature of the threat has changed. And I think that we are more divided than before. And that’s part of the threat right now.”
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