Reign of Terror: How 9/11 Armed Trump
The war on terror was supposed to keep America safe. Twenty-five years later, it handed Trump the weapons he’s now turning on Americans.
For 25 years we’ve marked September 11 as the day the world changed, a wound delivered from the outside, the morning a peaceful country was forced to become something harder than it meant to be.
Our guest on this week’s reprise WhoWhatWhy podcast, investigative journalist Spencer Ackerman argues almost nothing changed that day. What changed is that a door came open, and Donald Trump was waiting on the other side.The war on terror built the machinery: the surveillance, the watchlists, Homeland Security, the quiet sorting of real Americans from conditional ones.
Its architects swore it all pointed outward, at an enemy across an ocean. George W. Bush’s people built it. Barack Obama kept it running and expanded it. Both insisted to the end that it was aimed somewhere else. Then it passed to a man who understood what it was really for.
Trump turned it inward. He took migrant children from their parents, called protesters terrorists, and pointed the apparatus at anyone he decided did not belong.
The exemption that the war on terror had always given the white man with a flag and a gun allowed him to run straight to the Capitol on January 6. The line from that September morning to that January afternoon is not an accident of history. It is the design itself, finally in the open.
The war on terror was supposed to keep America safe. Twenty-five years later, the result is that it handed Trump the weapons he is now turning on Americans.
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