“You can’t draw a straight line between the twin towers falling and America entering a protracted nervous breakdown,” Michelle Goldberg wrote days ago. “It’s hard to draw a direct line from the reaction to 9/11 to Trump,” New York University professor of history Ruth Ben-Ghiat told CNN’s Stephen Collinson. Maureen Dowd looks back on 9/11 and sees men in charge in the wake of the attacks “seized by a dangerous strain of hyper-masculinity; fake tough-guy stuff; a caricature of strength.”
The last superpower standing had been publicly emasculated by a stateless, nukeless enemy half a world away armed only with box cutters and murderous purpose. The response in Washington was to treat radical Islam as the existential threat it was not. Wider America whose manliness had been questioned lost its collective mind and reached for the civilizational Viagra to show the Muslim world who’s boss.
“All of that empty swaggering ended up sapping America and making our country weaker,” Dowd writes:
After the respite of Barack Obama, Donald Trump became president. When Trump was running in the Republican primaries, focus groups reported that the quality voters most admired in the reality show star was “balls.” (He even referenced his anatomy during a debate.) His fans were posting memes of him as Rambo, quite an upgrade for Cadet Bone Spurs, and Trump himself tweeted a picture of himself as a shirtless Rocky. All this, even though he would later hit the White House bunker during the Black Lives Matter protests.
After riling up his supporters on Jan. 6 to swarm the Capitol, and telling them “we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you,” Rambo/Rocky retreated to the Oval Office to watch the chaos on TV.
Trump’s faux tough-guy routine led to the lethal political divide on masks, which undermined our ability to beat the virus. When Trump got Covid, he was happy to accept all the special medications he could get from his large team of doctors at Walter Reed. Yet he continued to act as though Covid was a minor annoyance, signaling to his red-state supporters that masks were for wimps.
Our response to 9/11 was, as much as any other motivation, a gut-level reaction to America having its mahood questioned. Those who led the country in its wake needed to reclaim it. Immediately. They sacrificed any moral high ground to the need for retribution. They sold out our values because they’d been kicked in the balls. Even if the line is not direct.
Goldberg adds:
The attacks, and our response to them, catalyzed a period of decline that helped turn the United States into the debased, half-crazed fading power we are today. America launched a bad-faith global crusade to instill democracy in the Muslim world and ended up with our own democracy in tatters.
What we see in electing a man so insecure in his own skin that he obsessively uses words like strongly, in Trumpists’ violent outbursts at being asked to wear masks, in the authoritarian rhetoric nearly ubiquitous on the right, and in displays of military-style firearms in public and in Republican campaign ads, may be seen as a manifestation (pun intended) of insecurities and inadequacies exposed like the foundations of the Trade Towers on 9/11.