They might as well place “Vote Trump” bumper stickers on the back of their suicide bomber’s vehicles.
ISIS members are hoping for a powerful new recruiting tool come November — a Donald Trump presidency.
Even though the GOP presidential candidate has promised to “knock the hell out of” ISIS, the terror group is rooting for him to win the upcoming general election because they believe it will boost their ranks along with their sick cause.
An analysis of ISIS social media channels and interviews with 12 members — some of whom have since defected — shows extremists strongly back Trump over his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, according to writers Mara Revkin and Ahmad Mhidi of Foreign Affairs magazine.
Trump’s over-the-top rhetoric makes him “the perfect enemy,” a former ISIS fighter told the magazine.
“I ask Allah to deliver America to Trump,” an ISIS spokesman wrote last week on an ISIS-affiliated outlet.
Another extremist posted on various ISIS social media channels that “The ‘facilitation’ of Trump’s arrival in the White House must be a priority for jihadists at any costs!” the magazine reported.
The jihadists interviewed by Foreign Affairs cited several reasons for their support of Trump — but mainly they felt the Republican’s anti-Muslim rhetoric would be great for recruitment.
ISIS organizers also said Trump’s extreme views would help radicalize more Muslims in the U.S. and Europe as well as inspire them to commit “lone-wolf attacks,” the magazine reported.
As for Clinton, she doesn’t appear in ISIS propaganda and recruitment videos, said an ex-fighter named Adel, because “she never says anything bad about Muslims.”
He noted that it was much harder to use Clinton as a recruitment tool because she always said “Islam is not our adversary” and “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people.”
Foreign Affairs is published by the highly-respected Council on Foreign Relations, a non-profit and nonpartisan membership organization “dedicated to improving the understanding of U.S. foreign policy and international affairs through the free exchange of ideas,” according to its website.
Several former ISIS fighters said Muslims in the Middle East already believe the West is against them — but the beauty of Trump is that he is an “incubator” for homegrown terrorists.
The general perception of him is that he must be “insane or crazy,” the magazine added.
“He must be smoking bad hashish to say such crazy things,” one ex-fighter said.
Jihadists also like what they see when it comes to Trump’s loose-lipped, shoot-from-the-hip decision-making.
He’s viewed by ISIS members as “an unstable and irrational leader whose impulsive decision-making” will hurt the U.S., Foreign Affairs found.
Jihadists are also thrilled at his flame-throwing style of handling international relations, with one ex-fighter saying Trump “talks like a crazy person — not just about Muslims but about U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia.”
An ISIS spokesman recently declared on one of its online portals that a Trump presidency would be a boon for terrorists because it will “cause trouble with Arab despots … especially in the Gulf. Trump’s reign in America will unsettle (Gulf) rulers and make them vulnerable. The religious clerics of these rulers will not be able to defend them, and large numbers of people will join jihad,” the magazine reported.
There’s also a belief that Trump will cause unrest with China and “maybe start a third world war.”
Ironically, the reasons ISIS pyschos are cheering on Trump are the same ones that prompted some 70 conservative national security experts to denounce his presidency bid in March.
“Mr. Trump’s own statements lead us to conclude that as president, he would use the authority of his office to act in ways that make America less safe, and which would diminish our standing in the world,” wrote the group, which included former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
“As committed and loyal Republicans, we are unable to support a Party ticket with Mr. Trump at its head. We commit ourselves to working energetically to prevent the election of someone so utterly unfitted to the office,” the group concluded.
Like ISIS, conservatives also cited Trump’s “hateful, anti-Muslim rhetoric,” which they said “endangers the safety and Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of American Muslims.”
Some Republicans have also blasted Trump’s admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his advocacy for waging trade wars, which they said would lead to “economic disaster in a globally connected world.”
The jubilant jihadists who are praying for a Trump win eerily echoed their message — with the hope that their apocalyptic vision comes true.
“I hope and I predict that the Republicans will win and they will run wild. There will be a devastating war and I believe that America will collapse like the Soviet Union,” an Iraqi ISIS backer said.