How Will the Brussels Attacks Affect the Presidential Race?
As with everything else that will happen around the world in the next seven-and-a-half months, many people are wondering how Tuesday morning’s terrorist attacks in Brussels will affect the U.S. presidential election.
That question probably won’t be settled anytime soon. We’ll likely still be debating the impact or non-impact months from now, just as we’re still wondering how last year’s attacks in Paris shaped the primary race: “They didn’t,” argues a reporter pointing to the fact that the GOP candidates continued on their polling trajectories unchanged. “Oh didn’t they?” counters another, offering the fact that the two candidates viewed as toughest on terrorism emerged as their parties’ presumptive nominees.
One thing Tuesday’s events, and the media scrum that followed, made abundantly clear was the fact that this race really is down to just two candidates: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Before the dust had a chance to settle after the tragic bombings, the Republican and Democratic frontrunners in the race were already on television, pitching their respective plans to combat ISIS, providing the clearest preview yet of what a general election match-up would look like.
Trump called in to Fox & Friends, Good Morning America and The Today Show Tuesday morning. In each phone interview, he argued that the attacks in Brussels further demonstrate the need to enact policy goals he’s outlined: building a wall along the Mexican border, barring Muslims from entering the country indefinitely, and using torture to root out terrorist plots.
“Frankly, waterboarding, if it was up to me, and if we change the laws or have the laws, waterboarding would be fine,” Trump told The Today Show. “We work within laws — they don’t work within laws. They have no laws. The waterboarding would be fine and if they could expand the laws I would do a lot more than waterboarding.”
Trump’s swift dominance of the airwaves was nothing new for the celebrity real-estate mogul. Throughout his campaign, Trump has proved adept at exploiting networks’ insatiable hunger for newsy, relevant soundbites. The liberal watchdog Media Matters recently found Trump has made a total of 63 call-in appearances on various TV news programs since January 2015; Clinton, by contrast, has called in just 17 times. (The disparity between Trump’s media footprint and the other candidates’ caused MSNBC host Chuck Todd to declare last week he would no longer allow Trump to phone in to appearances on Meet the Press.)
Though Clinton has been an infrequent guest on the morning-talk-show circuit, she surfaced Tuesday to offer a sharp rebuke to Trump’s bombast in the wake of the attacks. The former secretary of State called in to Good Morning America shortly after Trump, and systematically dismantled his policies point by point.