Aside from the garden-variety conservative havoc that Donald Trump will wreak, the biggest danger of his presidency is that he’ll someday encounter his very own Gulf of Tonkin. LBJ used the 1964 attack in the Gulf of Tonkin as a pretext to go all-in on the Vietnam War, and Trump could very easily find a similar sort of pretext to amp up his own authority in dangerous ways. But what is it likely to be?
That is an interesting point. And no, it hadn’t occurred to me before. Iyad el-Baghdadi walks through some of the likely consequences of an attack on a Trump-branded property here, but I don’t think he goes far enough. Something like this could be Trump’s Gulf of Tonkin. And now that it’s been pointed out, it seems almost painfully obvious that a terrorist attack like this is bound to happen.
