Donald Trump: Jihad at the Toll Booth

Anyone in New York who supports charging drivers a modest fee to enter a small part of Manhattan is, in the view of the American president, a radical left jihadist. Terrorism, then, over a fee of the kind that has long been common in major cities around the world. This is how far things have come: a traffic charge is now being put in the same neighborhood as holy war. Trump posted this bigoted insult online Tuesday morning, and it was only the high point of a much longer outburst.

First, he went after New York's so-called pied-à-terre tax, a tax on second homes worth at least $1 million. He called it a dangerous political experiment and falsely claimed it would drive people out of the city by the tens of thousands. Nothing of the sort has happened so far. The fact that a handful of wealthy property owners might have to pay a little more for their second address nevertheless strikes him as an assault on civilization, and when it comes to the plight of the second-home owner whose million-dollar crash pad in Manhattan might get a little more expensive, this president always seems to find his warmest words.

Only then did he get to congestion pricing. As president, he wrote, it was hard to sit back and watch a place he once loved go to ruin; financial and then social ruin was 100 percent certain, and on top of everything else, the radical left jihadists were now charging congestion pricing. This doesn't work in America, he said, and it had to be stopped immediately. What's remarkable is the precision with which he puts the odds of collapse at 100 percent, as though misery could be calculated down to the decimal point. Citizens who want fewer cars and cleaner air downtown become holy warriors overnight. The fact that his post demanded an immediate stop in capital letters fits the picture, because when the argument is missing, volume will have to do.

A philologist who kept a diary about the language of power during the Third Reich showed how a government loses all sense of proportion once it turns everything into a superlative and turns anyone who thinks differently into an enemy. When a fee becomes terrorism and a tax becomes ruin, words lose their weight, and all that's left is shouting. The small grows into the monstrous until no one knows anymore what a real emergency would look like. The phrase jihad at the toll booth isn't meant to win agreement, it's meant to create fear. A word like jihad, tossed around carelessly, wears itself out, and with it goes our vigilance toward what it once described.

Trump announced that his administration would examine whether the federal government had the legal authority to avert this disaster before it was too late for the millions of people who cherish New York and want to see it thrive instead of watching it become a filthy, decrepit place plagued by crime and subjected to mockery and scorn. Anyone who listens to the doom and gloom all the way through begins to suspect that this is less a description of a city than scenery for his own grand performance. It all came just one day after a Staten Island judge temporarily paused the tax law, a pause that was blocked again that very same day. Even the courts could barely keep up with the back and forth, and the question practically asks itself: Who exactly is creating the chaos the president is complaining about so loudly? Towering over it all was a man who had lost the very calm he promised to bring to the city. It would be funny if the man talking this way weren't the most powerful man in the world. The toll costs a few dollars. Declaring it a holy war costs only a word, and this president has always had words going cheap.