The day before the inauguration, Slate published a Jan. 19 interview from its “Amicus” podcast with Juliette Kayyem, who served as assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under President Barack Obama said: “I don’t feel comfortable calling Trump a terrorist just because I think that then we’re going to get into that debate. But it’s important to say that he’s the spiritual and operational leader of a domestic terrorism movement and that’s where we’ve landed. And that’s what I’ve been writing and talking about. And I did it not for name-calling but because now, I think, can we think about the prisms of counterterrorism as a solution?”
Dahlia Lithwick: “For me, the value of what you’re doing is saying, Look, I’m just going to call this domestic terrorism. We can have a conversation about what Trump’s responsibility is, but we’re not going to sit around and talk about free speech for the next three months.”
Juliette Kayyem: “That’s exactly right... That is what’s important so that you get to the counterterrorism framework: OK, what can we do, knowing now that this is an organized domestic threat? All of a sudden, the tools become more obvious: do all the things that you would otherwise do with any criminal organization. You prosecute, you investigate.”
