Politics
How would Trump have responded to 9/11? Let’s hope we never have to find out
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 Afghanistanbut 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 that it’s oft-cited as a major factor in Donald Trump’s hijacking of the Republican Party.
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.
Imagine Trump in his “I am your retribution” second administration.
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.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and writer for BLN Daily. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider.
The U.S. delegation in Seattle includes HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, according to a FIFA official, along with White House FIFA World Cup Task Force czar Andrew Giuliani. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy were among those who attended the U.S.’ first match, against Paraguay.
Britain wouldn’t have its latest likely next prime minister if not for soccer.
Andy Burnham, the former Greater Manchester mayor elected to the U.K. Parliament in a closely-watched by-election on Thursday, is expected to oust Prime Minister Keir Starmer as Labour Party leader in a matter of weeks. The sport propelled his political rise.
The pivotal moment of Burnham’s long political career came in 2009, when he was the Cabinet minister for culture, media and sport under then-PM Gordon Brown. Burnham was asked to return to his native Liverpool for a memorial commemorating the Hillsborough Disaster.
The 1989 event remains Britain’s worst-ever sporting catastrophe. Almost 100 Liverpool fans were crushed to death at a cup game in South Yorkshire, following a series of disastrous crowd control errors by police chiefs and stadium staff.
The horror of the day was compounded in the immediate aftermath, when police sought to cover up their mistakes by falsely blaming drunken Liverpool fans for the crush. The lies were amplified by a willing national media and allowed to linger for years; the city grieved and demanded justice. Bereaved families campaigned for years. But no one listened, and no one was held accountable.
Born in Liverpool and steeped in soccer culture, Burnham knew all this as he headed to the memorial at Liverpool’s Anfield stadium 20 years later. He was well aware how a young government envoy would be greeted by the crowd, still raging at the injustice two decades on. But to his credit, he went anyway — and was met with a wall of heckles, chants and protest songs from the part of Anfield, known as the Kop, where the team’s loudest supporters congregate. (The video of his halting, shattered-looking appearance is well worth watching.)
Burnham — until then a typical career politician in Westminster — has described the day as a seminal moment. He returned to Cabinet and demanded a new inquiry into Hillsborough. Three years later its report revealed every claim made by the justice campaigners — of police failures and a scandalous cover-up — had been true. The government was forced to apologize.
Burnham was widely praised for his role in exposing the truth about Hillsborough. But more significant in his ultimate rise to power would be the shift in his own psyche. “I always say that I took my first steps out of Westminster on 15 April 2009 when I walked out to face the Kop,” he wrote in his memoir, “Head North,” penned with close friend (and Hillsborough survivor) Steve Rotheram. “Things were never the same after that day.”
Burnham says his experiences dealing with the Hillsborough justice campaign shaped his view of the Westminster political machine, as an arrogant and failing institution which ignores English regions outside of London. Eight years later he would quit Westminster altogether to become a mayor in his native northwest.
Fast-forward to 2026, and Burnham finds himself in an enviable position — an experienced politician able to cast himself as a political outsider ready to take on the Westminster elites. (While Starmer supports the North London-based champions Arsenal, Burnham is a season ticket holder at his beloved Everton F.C., and is regularly photographed jogging in a vintage Everton jersey.) It’s a familiar narrative which chimes with disgruntled voters everywhere.
Read Jack’s Blue Light News Magazine profile of Andy Burnham here and Blue Light News’s full coverage of the Makerfield by-election and its unfolding fallout here.
Who’s not here at Seattle’s Lumen Field for the Pacific Rim face-off between the United States and Australia?
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