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This week saw the 20th anniversary of George W. Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln in which he announced victory after the invasion of Iraq. The speech is usually remembered because the mission in Iraq was actually very much not accomplished in May 2003, with the majority of the American and Iraqi deaths in the conflict occurring in the years that followed. More broadly, the speech showcased the arrogance, blindness and theatricality (Bush insisted on arriving on the carrier in a jet via an arrested landing) of America in the era of the War on Terror.
I think for many people, the Obama presidency felt like a transition from the era of the War on Terror to a new era in American life. Obama’s time in office began with the global financial crisis and ended with the election of Donald Trump, two issues which on the face of it didn’t revolve around terrorism. It also saw a sort of slow withering of liberal concern about what the War on Terror was doing to America itself. Many of the defining fights of the Bush presidency - about military intervention, Guantanamo, drones, surveillance - didn’t actually go away after 2008. In fact, they’re still relevant today. But they lost a huge degree of salience when the conversation shifted to the economic crisis, healthcare, and finally Trump.
When I look back at this period as a historian, though, I think the way that we commonly think about it is focused too much on surface events. Trump didn’t seem like a “War on Terror president” in the way that Bush did, but his election in 2016 and the broader discourse in which he swims were decisively shaped by the forces unleashed on 9/11. Only by recognizing and facing up to those forces is it possible to fully understand Trump, the MAGA movement, and the tools that they use to rip America apart.
In his “Mission Accomplished” speech, Bush said that the War on Terror is “not endless”. But what if it is?
The president as strongman
One of the main effects of 9/11 was that it inaugurated an era in which politics revolved to a great extent around the figure of the president as a strongman who had to take extraordinary, even illegal, measures to protect the nation from an existential threat. Historians call this “the imperial presidency” after a famous book by Arthur Schlesinger. George W. Bush really leaned into this identity as the one heroic figure who was holding back the tides of chaos, calling himself “The Decider” and pointing to the threat of terrorism to justify all kinds of abuses of executive and presidential power.
There was no major terrorist attack on American soil while Trump was president, so we thankfully didn’t have to see how he would react in a similar situation. But even in the absence of one, Trump’s campaign in 2016 was a distillation of the logic of the imperial presidency, putting forward a vision in which an unconstrained leader was necessary to protect the country from outside threats. In his very first TV ad, Trump presented the image of a country under siege. As grainy footage of terrorist explosions and immigrants storming the border rolled in the background, a voiceover promised that Trump would force Mexico to pay for his border wall, “cut the head off ISIS and take their oil”, and implement a Muslim ban. Liberal politicians, meanwhile, couldn’t even bring themselves to mutter the words “radical Islamic terrorism” - and so couldn’t be trusted to use the presidency to protect the nation.
Trump returned to these and other promises of unilateral presidential action during the campaign, including by advocating for the reintroduction of torture. He also praised global authoritarian leaders for acting decisively to protect their nations, noting for instance that while former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had his flaws, he also “killed terrorists... so good”. Trump’s attempt to frame himself in this way only made sense within the context of the War on Terror, in which the threat posed by terrorists to America is so great that the country needs a strong, even openly abusive, figure in order to protect it.
The importance of this framing for Trump’s political project became even more obvious when one of his signature policies turned out to be a Muslim ban. The Muslim ban and the related but ultimately unimplemented idea of the Muslim database, which were insanely popular among GOP primary voters, only make sense in the context of the War on Terror, which gave such prominence to the idea that Muslims represented the primary threat to America.
This was a dimension of the campaign to deny that Barack Obama was really an American citizen which I felt the media never paid sufficient attention. Birtherism wasn’t just a racist discourse, but it was also an Islamophobic discourse which was ultimately posited on the idea that Barack Hussein Obama was not just not an American, but was actually secretly a Muslim who was dedicated to destroying America from within. In late 2015 nearly half of Republicans told pollsters that they thought Obama was a Muslim, and Trump leaned into this by accusing Obama of being the “founder of ISIS”. Islamophobia has always existed in America - I recommend the great book The Racial Muslim if you want to explore that topic further - but it was 9/11 and its aftermath that gave it immediate salience in 2016. That’s why for me, you can’t imagine the rise of Donald Trump without 9/11.
Escaping accountability
Another part of the post-9/11 era which has been inseparable from Trump’s political career is the end of accountability for presidential and executive-branch wrongdoing. This, of course, isn’t entirely new - Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for his role in Watergate, and the Iran-Contra plotters eventually got pardons as well. But the era of the War on Terror has been accompanied by a dramatic rise in presidents engaging in flatly illegal or unconstitutional actions and getting away with it.
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