As Rick Perry would later say, "oops." Yes, the USSR dominated Eastern Europe.
Consider, then, how Trump approaches terrorist incidents. It is always some variation of, "I called it." Who, though, is on the Gerald Ford side?
Suppose Hillary Clinton were to say that there is no such thing as terrorism, that terrorism isn't a threat, etc. That would be a Gerald Ford moment. Trump's response, then, of claiming prescience would be the obvious one, since the premise of his campaign is that we live under constant dire threats from within and without. Without a Gerald Ford here, though, he wound up getting himself into trouble after the Orlando shooting with his "thanks for congratulating me" tweet.
So let me play Gerald Ford. Quit worrying about terrorism and read some old classics by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. The latter won a Nobel because the former died first and they don't give the Nobel to corpses. I guess they don't want to stink up the ceremony.
Anywho, one of their famous observations is that most people do a lousy job estimating probabilities, relying on faulty heuristics based on easily recallable events rather than formal math, leading to big errors. Terrorism is not a real threat to you. You will not die in a terrorist attack. You are more likely to die of a disease whose name you don't recognize. If you are worried about terrorism because you overestimate the likelihood of dying in a terrorist attack, you are making a Tversky & Kahneman mistake. Quit it. Now.
Why can I write that? Because I'm not running for office, and never will. Nobody would ever vote for me even before I typed that because I'm unmutual. Telling you that terrorism isn't a real threat to you would be a Gerald Ford moment, even though my math is right. It's one of those funny things, though, that the right is irrationally afraid of terrorism and the left is irrationally afraid of mass shootings. Neither will happen to you, so quit worrying about them.
But if a politician says that... Gerald Ford time. And if Hillary Clinton said that, Trump's response of "I called it" would be exactly the right thing to say, strategically. He'd get a lot more traction, anyway.
Regardless, social science lessons of the day: study statistics, read Tversky & Kahneman, and quit worrying about either terrorism or guns. You're more likely to contract an obscure disease. So go scare the shit out of yourself with WebMD! Yes, that's wacky too, but slightly less so.
