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Inside
A Quarter Century Since That Day
Trump’s Most Egregious 9/11 Lie
Florida Is Changing
The AI Panic Is Rising…and Justified
The War Is Going…Badly
The Toilet Paper President
Let Hitler be Hitler Isn’t Working
Answering A What-If
A Quarter Century Since That Day
Twenty-five years after September 11. The words don’t do the span of time justice.
A quarter of a century. Twenty-five years since the worst terrorist attack in our history, and twenty-five years in which this country should have learned something. Not everything. Nations rarely learn everything. But something.
I have thought hard about how to write about this day, and I keep arriving at the same unwelcome place. There is an elephant in the room this September 11th, and it is this: the terrorists won. Not on that morning. Not in the mountains of Afghanistan or the streets of Fallujah.
They won later, and they won here, and the man who handed them the victory was not a jihadi.
Try a thought experiment. Imagine Osama bin Laden somehow alive today and imagine him looking at America in September of 2026.
He would see a nation caught in a foolish, destructive war in Iran. He would see a country wrenched from crisis to crisis, panic to panic, corrupt scandal to corrupt scandal.
He would ask the only questions that ever mattered to him. Is America stronger in the world, or weaker? More respected, or not respected at all? A nation with strong alliances, or a nation with none? A country people look up to, or one they disdain?
He would know the answers. So do you.
The worst thing bin Laden could do to us, the very worst, was to murder three thousand innocent people in a grotesque and terrifying attack. His movement paid a ferocious price for it. He personally took a couple of rounds to the head for it, and rightly so.
And nothing he accomplished that day, and nothing in the many mistakes America made in the long war that followed, came anywhere close to causing the position we find ourselves in today.
I am not sure Donald Trump could even parse the question of whether the world now looks more like the one bin Laden wanted or less. Nothing coherent would emerge.
But the world Trump has built in a mere nineteen months of his second term is chaos, economic calamity, and a nation more divided than it has been in living memory. It is a world in which Americans are on a long downward slide, looking abroad and seeing other countries stronger, safer, better at the things that make a life livable and a future certain. It is a world our worst enemies could not have imagined twenty-five years ago.
If you were bin Laden, looking back across that long arc, you would think to yourself: the infidel is now led by a man who will do more of my work than I ever could.
The canonical purpose of terrorism is to terrify. To produce a spectacle that alters the public soul. September 11 did that.
But terrorism depends on something more than fear. It depends on division, on paranoia, on anger. It depends on a story told to the people who will become suicide bombers, and the story goes like this. You are oppressed because of them.
Who “they” are hardly matters; capitalists, Jews, the Great Satan, whoever is convenient. They have hurt you, or people like you, or your family, or some part of your world. They are so evil and so powerful that the only way to defeat them is to follow the most extreme leader you can find, and to do things you know would never be permitted in a morally bounded society.
Stop me if this sounds familiar.
The psychology by which terrorist movements recruit, manipulate, and convert ordinary men into pilots on a September morning bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the conversion of Americans into MAGA. I am not saying every Trump voter is an al-Qaeda terrorist. I am saying they have become perfectly comfortable with the belief that there is a “they” causing their problems, that a radical leader is the solution, and that radical action is demanded.
The people who would like Donald Trump to be a king, who would prefer America to be a monarchy or an autocracy, are, in many cases, extraordinarily wealthy and extraordinarily powerful, seated in the highest ranks of government, business, and technology.
They do not look at this country the way the country looked at itself in the days after the attack. They do not want you unified. They do not want you at peace with your neighbors. They do not want you living in a land where the law, the Constitution, and those quaint old things we call norms and institutions still matter. They want you beset with fear, constantly on edge, waiting for those people to come and get you. The villain's identity morphs and mutates as needed. It tends to be brown in their minds, but fungible.
And so all the sacrifice of that terrible day has led us to a world where the terrorists won, and where we have committed to a war against Iran that will breed a hundred years more of them.
Bin Laden was a Saudi, shaped by a strain of Wahhabism that feared modernity above almost everything, that suspected the royal family loved its Western playthings too much. He was not entirely wrong; modernity does alter societies, and not always for the better. But he was produced by a climate and a moment that could last.
His theory of the case had the structure of the Underpants Gnomes. Step one: attack America. Step two: unclear. Step three: caliphate. He never had a compelling case for how to truly destroy America.
What he ran into instead was a certain American resilience, and a problem he never solved. The Americans he cast as intruders in the land of the two holy sites were also the Americans delivering food aid to Africa and vaccinating children against diseases that had killed them for millennia. As much as you could hate us, there was an attraction to America, to its freedom and liberty and opportunity, that no amount of theology could erase.
When he attacked us twenty-five years ago today, we still had a reservoir of goodwill in the world. Our NATO allies invoked Article V for the first and only time in the alliance’s history. They rushed to our side, and they died next to us in cold mountain passes and searing deserts and every damned place in between.
None of that exists today. Not the alliances, not the unity, not the shared shock and horror at what had been done to us. The terrorist in chief has broken them deliberately, systematically, maniacally.
I had left New York the year before. I worked for Rudy Giuliani for a long time, back when that name meant something different, and I lived in the city for years. I was supposed to be up there that week. Plans changed. I didn’t make it.
But my friends were there, including people I loved. Several of them did not survive the day. I had friends at the Pentagon who did not survive the day either. A lot of the ones who lived were different afterward, forever, and you cannot blame them.
When I went to work at City Hall in the winter of 1998, I would take the 4-5-6 down from my apartment on 81st between First and Second, and when I came up out of the station and walked toward the office, I would see the Twin Towers every morning. I am no modernist. I do not love modern architecture. But I looked up at those buildings in absolute awe, every day.
When they came down, the first thing in my head was: where are my friends? I was calling everyone I knew and loved. I reached a few, thank God. One of them was running down the stairs, and he did not yet know what had happened to the North Tower. He knew there was a fire in the building. That was all.
I got up there as soon as we could travel. Near the site, the fence outside St. Paul’s Chapel was covered in missing posters. I watched two men helping a little old lady out of a cab. She had to be in her eighties or nineties, and she stood looking down that row of faces. A son? A daughter? A husband? I never knew. I could not stand there long. It held the whole tragedy of that day in one small frame.
What I also saw was resilience. My friend John Avlon wrote a brilliant essay for City Journal called “The Resilient City,” and he was right. The love of their fellow man that you did not expect from the cliched, canonical New Yorker was there in awesome quantities.
Something happened right after the attack that we have never recaptured. It was not just anger. It was coherence. The country knew who it was.
Yes, you can nitpick every decision of that day and every decision that followed. You can say Bush was stupid. Fine. You can say Giuliani shouldn’t have put EOC in WTC 7. Fine. Our reach and our grasp were very different things, and I do not begrudge anyone who critiques the wars. But there was a moment, and there was a path, and even if the path we could have stayed on it a little longer. We have never had that unity since. Perhaps the night bin Laden was killed, you could taste a little of it in the air again. Perhaps.
The anniversaries have ticked past. The young firefighters are the old firefighters now. The young cops on that scene are old cops. The people who escaped those buildings have watched for twenty-five years as the damage bin Laden wanted to inflict on us was compressed into the last couple.
We are not safer in this world, and that is not because of George Bush or Barack Obama or Joe Biden in Afghanistan or Iraq. Count every mistake you like; there are plenty. But what bin Laden dreamed of was an America alone, divided, dispirited, defeated. He did not get it from the attack or even from the long GWOT.
He got it from Donald Trump.
Somewhere in hell, bin Laden is thinking to himself: “I didn’t have to do any of it. I could have just waited for this guy.”
MAGA will be outraged over the comparison of the two titans of evil. Too bad.
Trump earned that comparison. He earned it by what he has done to this country.
We are not, right now, a United States of America. We are not, in aggregate, good people right now. Seventy-seven million of us voted for this. They wanted it. Fifty million of them probably still like it a great deal. We are led by a man who has done more damage to this nation than Osama bin Laden could have imagined in his most fevered prayers.
There are children in the world now who do not remember that day, and in some ways that is a blessing. They do not remember the buildings coming down, or the shock, dread, and confusion. Time erases the sharper edges of pain even for those of us who do remember it with a punishing, crystalline clarity. Time makes other things seem more important. There were still people alive on September 11, 2001, who remembered Pearl Harbor, another day of absolute shock and terror, and of unity and love. There are very few of them now.
It is tempting to believe we would respond the same way if we were attacked like that again. I am not sure we would. That is the tragedy of this moment, and in some spiritual sense it rivals the damage of the day itself: the knowledge that we have been deliberately broken, deliberately divided, deliberately weakened, torn apart for one man’s ego and corruption and venality.
I believe in America. I believe in this big, fucked-up, wonderful nation in ways I cannot always express. I believe in its greatness, not the synthetic red-hat garbage version of greatness sold by you know who, but the real thing: our strength, our resilience, our compassion, our willingness to seek justice and to be our best selves. I think of Father Mychal Judge. I think of Terry Hatton. I think of Barbara Olson.
I think of the friends I lost and the ones who came back changed. I think of the unity that emerged that day as the only salutary note in it, and of the families who carry a generational burden the rest of us can only imagine.
Nothing about that day should be forgotten. I know that is a harder assignment every year. But this anniversary is both a tribute to the country we were and a warning about the country we have become.
I pray that twenty-five years on, we have not lost our way back to what we can be.
