Pretty high up on the list of things I’ve been worried about for the next four years (ordered by importance, not alphabetically) is a Reichstag scenario. Trump gets himself elected by promising a solution to the world in chaos that doesn’t actually exist, and then once in power creates exactly that chaos as a means of justifying and extending his power. This is what the Nazis did with the Reichstag fire one month after they came into power. (Despite the claims of conspiracy theorists, the consensus of historians is that the Dutch Communist van der Lubbe acted alone. The Nazis simply stoked the outrage and took advantage of it after the fact.)
A major symbolically significant terror attack would be just the ticket. And what could be more symbolically powerful than a direct attack on the prestige of the new thin-skinned president? Several people have been pointing out, what I hadn’t thought about before, but now terrifies me: All over the world there are defenceless towers that have the Trump name in big letters, often in countries with active terror movements and significant popular hostility to Trump and/or the US, including Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and India. (I don’t particularly mean to include Chicago among these, though Trump Tower residents there have been worrying about this problem for the past year.) These are now de facto US embassies from the point of view of aggrieved There’s no way to protect them all. Most of these are only renting the Trump name, so the owners could perhaps protect themselves by renaming the buildings.
Common Infirmities 