Trumpian Tactics After Nice

“Let’s do tactics tonight,” Bill O’Reilly, of Fox News, said to Donald Trump, a few hours after a truck driver plowed into a crowd in Nice. “Because you could be President in five months, and another two to be sworn in.” Trump, who was on the phone, had already agreed to O’Reilly’s assertion that if the attack, which killed more than eighty people, many of them small children, was an act of terrorism, as it appeared, then we were in “a world-war scenario.” He added, “I’ve been saying it for a long time.” The attack seemed, to Trump, to be proof of a lot of things he had said for a long time. The plight of France, our NATO ally, was a reminder that we ought to be getting our money’s worth from the alliance (“We should use NATO for a purpose”); that immigrants and refugees might be “the ultimate Trojan horse”; that there was something strange about President Barack Obama (“You never know with him . . . why he refuses to use the term ‘radical Islamic terror’ ”) and, by extension, about Hillary Clinton (“She’s another one. She’s very weak”). Most of all, Trump believed that there was a war on, against an enemy whose face he believed he saw in America, and, when O’Reilly wanted to know if he’d ask Congress to formally declare it, Trump sounded surprised that he’d even ask: “I would! I would!” (Hillary Clinton, who also called in to the show, was careful enough to say that this was “a different kind of war,” and spoke about strengthening alliances and launching an “intelligence surge.”)