Why the tragedy of 9/11 is also a lesson about leaders like Trump

The “tribute of light” had a test run last Saturday night. Since 2002, the dress rehearsal has been an annual tradition in New York City, coming a few days before the 9/11 anniversary — when enormous 7,000-watt xenon light bulbs are projected 4 miles into the sky near the site where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once stood. It’s always a striking image, capable of giving even the most jaded New Yorkers pause — briefly bringing them back to that time of horror, rage and bewilderment. 

I’ll always remember the first 9/11 anniversary — when the tribute of light premiered — because so much of what had happened over that year was unprecedented, terrifying and, in hindsight, completely irrational. 

Almost 3,000 people were killed in the attack. The Taliban quickly fell in Afghanistan, but the beginning of a 19-year-long war — which they would win — had only just begun. There were anthrax attacks in newsrooms and congressional offices. There were FBI roundups of innocent Muslims. Congress passed the Patriot Act, hyper-charging the surveillance state. The disastrous Iraq War would begin seven months later. 

America’s military misadventure in Iraq was such a fiasco, in fact, that it’s oft-cited as a major factor in Donald Trump’s hijacking of the Republican Party, which is now more a personality cult than a political organization with coherent politics.

When Trump announced his presidential run in 2015, there were plenty of reasons to be concerned. He was overtly racist. He encouraged violence among his followers. He promised a “Muslim ban.” The thought of what he might do in a national crisis, like 9/11, was terrifying to some of us. But to many others who still wouldn’t vote for him, Trump was all talk, he was a clown, his rhetoric was a sideshow and a distraction to the real issues — like tax cuts or something. 

Thankfully, we never had to find out how Trump would have led a frightened, angry country flailing around after a murderous assault on the homeland. We did, however, get a good look at what he’d do as the leader of the free world during a once-in-a-century global crisis — which was to deny the crisis was happening, then lie to the public about the severity of the crisis, then put his nepo baby son-in-law and his cronies in charge of handling the crisis. It didn’t go well, by any metric. 

Before that crisis had ended, he tried to steal an election that he decisively lost and directly incited a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol. He literally broke the revered American tradition of peaceful transfer of power. Thanks to the cowardice and opportunism of Mitch McConnell, he avoided conviction at his second impeachment, leaving him still eligible to serve in elected office, and nearly four years later — here we are.

Unlike in September 2001, there are smartphones, social media and podcasts with legions of followers readily available to amplify the loudest fearmongering, disinformation-spreading morons. And Trump is not only their hero; he’s their audience. 

At Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Trump rattled off a host of fake, inflammatory internet-created stories — the kind spread by those very same highly influential internet morons. 

Imagine Trump in his “I am your retribution” second administration. The one in which he’s promised to jail political opponents, journalists, judges and prosecutors. The one in which he’s promised to violently uproot and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. The one in which — thanks to state-level Republican efforts and a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court — he’s got very few remaining guardrails to keep him from executing his authoritarian impulses with impunity. 

There probably wouldn’t be any former generals to talk him out of impulsive bombing campaigns or invoking the Insurrection Act. Even Jared and Ivanka wouldn’t be there to try to talk him out of slaughtering protestors. But he very likely would have supplement-shilling podcasters giving him his intelligence reports, printed straight off of 4chan. 

If something like 9/11 happened under a second Trump administration, you wouldn’t need to let your imagination run wild. The aspirational “dictator for a day” has already told us what he plans to do — and the past nine years have made the anti-anti-Trumpers who told us to “take Trump seriously but not literally” look even more inexcusably pliant than they did in 2015. 

I don’t think anyone can really argue America handled 9/11 “well,” but if an attack on that scale were to happen again, Trump is probably the worst person imaginable to have all the power in the world.