11, 2001, they provoked a response that, seen from today’s perspective, seems remarkable: The country immediately united across every political and ideological divide. When terrorists attacked America on Sept.
All told, it isn’t hard to draw a line from 9/11 to the rise of the Make America Great Again movement of President Trump, who once falsely claimed that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrated the terrorist attacks. Today, the share of Americans who think the country is moving in the right direction is about a third of what it was after 9/11; the job approval of President Trump now is 40 points lower than it was for President Bush then. It was far from certain the country would respond as it did after 9/11, for there was plenty of the usual political bickering going on in the nation’s capital at the time. Pat Ryan, a Democrat from New York state who served two combat tours in Iraq, recently led a group of 10 House veterans in taking a stand against the Iran campaign.
In the tense minutes after the initial strike, as smoke was rising from the Pentagon nearby, nearly everyone assumed that either the White House or the Capitol building had to be next on the terror target list—an assumption confirmed when another airliner went down in a field in Pennsylvania, apparently falling short of its target in Washington.
11 “set in motion a pattern of fear and anger that took us in a sad new direction,” says John Hamre, a former top defense official and longtime leader of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a national-security think tank. 11, dozens of members of Congress from both parties gathered on the steps of the Capitol and sang “God Bless America” in a nationally televised show of unity. After “trillions of dollars and countless deaths” in the earlier Middle East fights, “I refuse to let the country I love make those same mistakes again,” Ryan said in a statement.
The oxygen feeding the MAGA forces is precisely the anger and dissatisfaction with the political establishment that has emerged in the years since. The events of Sept. Bush had taken office only after a Supreme Court decision gave him the Electoral College votes needed to win. Many Democrats were still seething. Congress was evenly divided between the two parties—a recipe for gridlock. The shock in the nation’s capital was complete. President Bush was out of town and was hustled onto his plane, which was flown to a destination unknown. Vice President Dick Cheney was taken underground at the White House, literally. The Journal’s own headquarters in New York, across the street from the World Trade Center, was knocked out of business, the fate of our colleagues there unknown for hours. From the windows of the Journal’s eighth-floor Washington bureau, a look down at the streets of the nation’s capital showed absolute gridlock in every direction as people rushed to flee downtown to a more safe locale, somewhere. Inside government and out, people were forced to think thoughts they’d never entertained before: Are my kids safe? Should we flee to the countryside? Why are jet fighters flying overhead? Compared with such questions, political disagreements suddenly seemed small and petty. Instead, the impulse was to unite and fight a new War on Terror, which many observers soon likened to pulling together to fight World War II. Within hours of the attacks, on the evening of Sept. And it wasn’t just the U.S. that pulled together, but also the world. America’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies, for the first and only time in the alliance’s existence, invoked Article five of the NATO charter, which deemed the attack on the U.S. an attack on all member states. Russian leader Vladimir Putin sent the U.S. a gift, a sculpture, as a memorial in the fight against terror. Vice President JD Vance, to cite the most prominent example, served with the Marines in Iraq, and was among the senior Trump administration aides least convinced about the wisdom of the current conflict with Iran. On the other side of the aisle, Rep.
The election that had brought Republican President Bush into office less than a year earlier, in a victory over Democrat Al Gore, was still controversial.
