Evan Osnos

The very bipartisan gathering of congressmen and -women on the steps of the Capitol building on 9/11. They decide to sing “God Bless America.” Tell us about that moment and what it said about America just post-the attack.

Here it was, just a few hours after members of Congress had been evacuated from the building. Being evacuated from the Congress was itself a kind of shock to the psyche for the people who work there, and then also for the rest of the country who was experiencing this on television. It created this sense of uncertainty: Who exactly was in charge, and how prepared were we for that moment? And—and, you know, watching the faces of these people—I went back and looked at it, thinking in advance that you—I knew you were interested in that. When you watch them on the steps of the Capitol that day, there is this spontaneous moment of unity, of togetherness. And it’s quite striking. I mean, there are members of Congress standing right side by side; you recognized the faces. There are prominent Republicans and prominent Democrats.

And then if you sort of look one more beat, and you look into their faces, you also see this real sense of uncertainty. I just—you read it on their faces, that they don’t quite know what’s going to happen next. I was quite taken with that moment because it was Denny Hastert, the Republican, and Tom Daschle, the Democrat, who both gave statements. And it was a real gesture of the sense that no matter how much of an assault this was on our American identity at that moment, that we were going to find something within ourselves that would rise above it and would pull us together.

Let me ask you a big question first anyway, and then we’ll move to the specifics. How did 9/11 change America? How did it in 20 years change America, the politics, the division, how Americans see themselves? Just give me the overview of how it really did affect us overall.

I think 9/11 was the beginning of an avalanche of changes in American life, in how we saw ourselves as individuals, in terms of our relationship to our neighbors, how—who we thought was a citizen, who deserved to be a citizen, who could seek refuge on our shores, who did we need to protect and how were we going to protect ourselves. It created this sense of fragility within our—within our daily lives, but then also within our political lives as well.

And I think actually, Jim, to be more specific, there’s an interesting detail which I sometimes think of, which is that when Osama bin Laden talked about 9/11, he sometimes said that the purpose of it was a strategy that he called “death by a thousand cuts,” by which he meant it was not just the symbolic power of taking down the World Trade Center, the symbol of global capitalism in his mind. It was also the beginning of a process, of a cascade of events that was informed by his understanding of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, but would ultimately lead the United States, on its own, through its own decisions, to do a series of things that would, in the end, weaken the United States rather than strengthen it. That was bin Laden’s idea.

He would say, when he was in hiding, he would give these videos, give these speeches in which he would say that the United States will be bled, that it will be bled economically and politically, and that it will begin to expend its people and its money and its political energy around the world. At one point he said, “All we have to do is send two mujahideen to the distant shores of some country and they hang a piece of fabric in the air, a flag, and the United States will send its forces there. And every time it does that, it gets a little bit weaker and a little bit overextended.”

And so his image was of a kind of recipe of imperial decline. And that’s what was all beginning in that moment on Sept. 11.

So that’s one side of the chessboard. The other side of the chessboard is the Bush administration at that point. [President George W.] Bush’s speech on that night, when he gets back to Washington [D.C.], he defines this as a war of good versus evil. He will talk about the fact that what we need to do is we need to spread democratic values; this is a war to stop terrorism, but it’s also the need to bring democratic values to this part of the world. How did the Bush administration view this enemy, compared to what bin Laden was thinking?

I think in Bush’s speech he responded to that moment with a kind of pithy formulation. What he said was, “This is a battle of good versus evil,” and that was comforting in its own way to Americans because the attack had been so shocking, and had been on home turf, and had been so rare in the American experience that we wanted something to frame it in terms that we could understand and that made it feel larger than just the fact that we’d been caught flatfooted by a terrorist attack.

One of the other key details in the way that the Bush administration talked about this emerging war on terror was that it would be a limitless battlefield. It would go everywhere and anywhere, and that it would require a level of constant vigilance on the part of Americans and on the part of the government, and that really, that the stakes were so large that anything was necessary, anything was justified in pursuit of defending ourselves and our homeland.

You had in that period, Jim, it was an innovative period in the thinking around American national security. You had the creation of new agencies—the Department of Homeland Security, which would consolidate a lot of these features of America’s structures of self-defense, immigration and jurisprudence and justice and investigation, all of these things put together.

And then you also had this innovation going on in how we would attack our enemies around the world using things like drone warfare and using the ability to undertake extraordinary techniques of interrogation, which eventually, of course, were described as torture. And, you know, that was this period in which America was—was really—you know, Bush’s speech was laying down the philosophical doctrine that would then inspire a whole range of political decisions and innovations that had consequences way beyond what we could have imagined.

Let’s talk first about Vice President [Dick] Cheney’s secret dark side war, the fact that we needed to go to the “dark side.” He defined a very different kind of American way of fighting, and it leads, of course, to CIA black sites, and it leads to torture. 11Meet the Press: Interview with Vice President CheneyWhat was going on here, and how does the dark side part of this scenario cast a shadow forward?

Well, there was a tension between the high-minded language that Bush would use to describe what the American project now was and this quite chilling conception that Dick Cheney had of how the United States would have to go about it. Dick Cheney’s view was that the gloves were off; that the attack on the United States was so grave and so profound and so far-reaching that the U.S. could not afford to confine itself to traditional notions of military decorum and what it meant to adhere to the highest standards of treatment of prisoners; that we were now legally and philosophically in a war everywhere, all the time, and therefore new things were justified, like torturing prisoners if it meant that you could prevent an imminent attack.

And the concept that the United States was always at risk of an imminent attack became a really powerful engine of decision making, because you could—you could justify waterboarding a prisoner or exposing them to technique that would have been illegal under international law because you were protecting American citizens. And you know, in those months after 9/11, many of the people at the top of the American national security system at the CIA, in the White House, felt as if they were in the preamble to another attack. They thought that the United States could get attacked again, and that was kind of on their minds and became a permission system to do things that would have been considered unconscionable at other moments in American history.

So in January of ’02, Bush is talking about the fact that we’re going to wage a war against the axis of evil. What was he doing there? Looking back, how does it define how things will play out? How does it affect how our allies look at it, how citizens in the United States view it?

Over time, this concept of a limitless battlefield was expanding in specific ways. He began to enumerate other countries that constituted, in his description, a kind of crescent of aggression against the United States, that extended all the way from North Korea to Iran to Iraq. It was this wildly disparate group of places and ideologies and geographies. But in the political description, it began to take on a power of its own, that this was something that the United States could not afford not to confront because we would then leave ourselves at risk of once again something like 9/11. That was always lurking in the background. 9/11 had become—had taken on this symbolic power where it could be—you didn’t even have to say it by name to remind Americans of what it felt like to be vulnerable in that moment.

And there was an acceleration going on where President Bush and his advisers began to talk about the idea of Iraq and other powers as posing a grave threat to the United States, one that we could not afford not to attack; that if we waited, as Condoleezza Rice and others famously said, a smoking gun would be—

A smoking gun would turn into a mushroom cloud.

But what you’re seeing over time is what had begun with this specific attack on American installations in New York and Washington had now grown into this much larger and graver attack on America in the political language, the idea that we weren’t at risk just of terrorism, but in fact we were at risk of a nuclear attack, a WMD. And that was an entirely new realm of conceivable combat.

That was a whole new chapter.

Looking back, the sales pitch. They pick Colin Powell. Why him? 22Inquiries Journal: Colin Powell: Examining a Key Player in the Bush AdministrationWhy the focus on weapons of mass destruction, and how this preemptive war that they were defining was necessary based on lies, as it turns out, what the consequences will be?

There was a—there was this struggle going on within the CIA and within parts of the administration about what they could reasonably say in public that would be defensible, that it– what could they actually say to justify this war in Iraq that would not only persuade American allies in Europe and elsewhere, but would also stand up to scrutiny. And there was this fight going on. There was a—there was a constant pressure from the vice president’s office to try to put in more and more alarming information, even if it’s tenuous, if it was based on unreliable sources. And there was pressure from within—it was also, there were intelligence analysts who said that they needed to keep this out of it, that you couldn’t rely on this material.

Colin Powell was the perfect messenger for this because he had credibility. He was perceived as being a step apart from Dick Cheney and the architects of the war on terror. He was, after all, a military general. His credibility came from the fact that he himself had sent young men and women in to fight. And if he, now in his position as secretary of state, was going to come forward and vouch for American credibility, that would be a signal to the rest of the world that this was now an argument that was beyond just the architects of the war on terror; it was now something that even a professional military man like Colin Powell could support.

Colin Powell was very popular in the United States and around the world. He’d been talked about as a presidential candidate. People thought of him as somebody who would not be corrupted by the particular ambitions and individual political grudges that might be operating elsewhere in the administration. He seemed to be above it all.

And when he got in front the U.N. and said that the evidence was unimpeachable, it became very hard for American allies to dispute that.

But the thing is, they’re playing a very dangerous game here. They’re playing with the credibility. They’re selling something which might not be true—and turns out not to be true—and they’re playing with the credibility of the United States. And not only are they good at this sales pitch, the Democrat and Republican congressmen go along with it, so they’re going to affect the credibility of Congress. The media mostly goes along with it; they’re going to affect the credibility of the media. So talk about how dangerous it was, what they were doing.

As it became clear that the United States may in fact be going to war in Iraq, there was a real pressure on people in politics and in the media to get with the program, to see what it was that the people who could read the intelligence were seeing. There was a feeling that—there was a feeling that—I want to tie this back to 9/11 because I think it’s important.

The shadow of 9/11 hung heavily over people because they felt as if we were still at—we were still at risk, we were still vulnerable, and it was going to be up to the political leadership to protect Americans. And if that meant going into Iraq, well, then, they must have good reasons to do it. The American public was being asked to believe—to believe the intelligence that people could not read themselves; to believe the arguments that this was a logical war, a strategically winnable war. They were being asked to believe that all of this could happen just exactly as Dick Cheney and George Bush described.

But of course, it was all happening at a remove because your average American wasn’t in those rooms. They weren’t looking at that intelligence. They weren’t assessing the credibility of the sources. All they could do was put their trust in the people at the top to make a decision in our name as Americans that this was the wise course.

The government asked people to trust it. They said, “We know what we’re doing.” They projected confidence; they projected authority. Part of this was compensating for the fact that they had failed to anticipate the attack of 9/11, and so there was a—there was almost an overreaction, an overcorrection where people, the government wanted to project total authority, total command of the situation. George Bush wanted people to understand that he knew what he was doing. And people—people were—were eager to believe.

And the consequence, for instance, to the media when it turns out that they had swallowed a lie?

It was a disaster for the media.

When it became clear that the justifications for the war in Iraq were a lie, it was a disaster for the media. I mean, some of the most credible, most respected American news organizations, like The New York Times, had written very detailed and, in its own way, supportive coverage of the evidence. Their sources in the Pentagon and in the White House were telling them that this was a war that needed to happen. And those lies, in effect, were translated through the credibility of news organizations, right there into the field of view of Americans.

And so when it turned out that the evidence had been manipulated and falsely represented, it didn’t just undermine the credibility of the administration; it undermined the credibility of the American media who had been so instrumental in getting that message out to the public.

And I think it was actually even more damaging than we understood at the time, because at the time, one could argue these are complicated stories, and you do the best you can as a reporter, and you try to talk to multiple sources and weigh their accounts off of one another. But the reality is, there’s a momentum that takes hold within the media that people read each other’s stories. They get a sense that somebody else—the competitor—may have access to some better piece of information, some higher level source, so what are we missing? And editors would say to reporters, “Why is it that this person over here is getting this pretty good, privileged look at some great intelligence? Why don’t you have it? Find it, and beat it; compete with it.”

And so it became—it becomes a self-reinforcing ideology of a kind that people want to be on the inside. They want to have that access. They want to be talking to the people with their hands on the levers of power. It’s very seductive. And in the end, it’s also very destructive.

One event that we’ve covered in many films and we’re going to cover probably in this one as well is that, because of symbolically how seductive it is and fascinating it is, Saddam Hussein’s statue being brought down in April of ’03. Were you there at that point?

I was in Baghdad on that day. I wasn’t at the foot of the statue. I was with another Marine unit. It was a Marine unit that brought down the statue, and I was with a Marine unit at Baghdad University that was in a firefight there.

What does that represent? Talk a little bit about what that meant and then what it meant in reality, and how people, Iraqis and U.S. soldiers, viewed where we were at that moment, and how wrong we were.

The image of that statue falling in Firdos Square was so powerful. It was so simple in its way, accessible. You could hardly imagine an image that would drive home more clearly the fact that Iraq was fundamentally changing at that point. That was the idea. The tyrant is gone; a new day has arrived. That was the feeling. American soldiers and Marines climbing all over and pulling down the statue of the Iraqi dictator—the story told itself. And—or at least that’s what we thought the story was supposed to say.

I was with a Marine unit that day elsewhere in Baghdad, and we woke up the next morning, and there was a meeting for the Marines. They were being told of the day’s events, what they were then going to do. And this was the first day since the invasion had begun in which the job was no longer marching towards Baghdad, fighting Iraqi forces, the Fedayeen, the people who were fighting along the way.

The Marines who I was with were told that they were going to be sent around the city to take up positions near important buildings, but it wasn’t clear at all what their job was going to be. You know, they weren’t trained to be police officers. They didn’t understand what it would mean to interact with the civilian population. They’d been sent there to fight a foreign military, but overnight, all of a sudden, they were being asked to keep the peace with civilians. And there was a real—there was a lot of confusion.

And I remember, on the day after that statue fell, sitting around, and Marines were already getting—they were getting anxious, antsy. They wanted to go. I mean, this—it seemed like this was over, right? I mean, that’s what this was supposed to be. And of course it wasn’t over. I mean, it was just very—it was at the very beginning.

So things keep getting worse. Time, months and months and months are passing by. Then there’s a real turning point in a lot of people’s minds, which is in April of ’04, Abu Ghraib. The pictures come out of Abu Ghraib.

When Abu Ghraib broke, I was in Baghdad, and I remember we went out right on the day that the news broke. As I was thinking about how do we try to understand the implications of this, I wanted to try to find people who had been locked up in Abu Ghraib and had been released. And so we went out to a neighborhood in Baghdad that had a large Sunni population, because many of the Sunni insurgents had found their way into Abu Ghraib at one point or another. And we pulled up on a neighborhood that was roiling. I mean, I didn’t—we hadn’t realized before we got there just how hostile it was going to be.

I would say, almost instantly overnight in Baghdad, after Abu Ghraib broke, there was a change in the air, a feeling among Iraqis, particularly among Sunni Iraqis, that we were now a hostile power who were there to try to undermine their lives, their future, their way of life. And it became instantly more dangerous.

And the insurgency suddenly had a whole reason to be, because Americans—Iraqis started to say to me over and over again, “These are the kinds of things Saddam used to do to people, humiliate them and degrade them and torture them.” And so almost instantly, America’s moral credibility in Iraq had been undermined, and there was photos to prove it. And that became—you know, that’s what was happening in Iraq, but there was something similar going on at home.

For more than two years after the attack on Sept. 11, Americans had been told to believe in the possibility that we were engaged in this big, noble project, not only of defending ourselves, but of bringing our values and democracy to the rest of the world. And those photos gave a lie to that message, and it made a lot of Americans at home begin to wonder, what are we doing over there? What are we doing in our own name? What is our government saying to us, and what are we a part of? And what are we sending our young men and women over to fight for?

And I think at the same time, you know, the costs of the war are becoming clear in literal terms, that the amount of money the United States is spending overseas is growing, Americans at home who are looking at their own communities and beginning to wonder, “Well, is there money for us here?” These two facts are suddenly in juxtaposition with one another, and people are beginning to compare the—this very flawed American venture in Iraq with the fact that they’re feeling deprived at home and left behind. And that’s the beginning of a tension that would become more acute.

And one other turning point, which you’ve talked about already, the effect, eventually when it sinks in, that there are no weapons of mass destruction, the effect of that.

Americans had been told that the war in Iraq was to find weapons of mass destruction. That was a clear and accessible target for people to understand. And when it became clear that there were no WMD, well, then the mission changed. And the mission became something larger and more amorphous, and sort of endless, the idea that we were going to implant democracy inside Iraq.

It became clear quite quickly that Americans had been sold a false bill of goods by the government and that this ironclad case that Colin Powell had presented in front of the U.N. was anything but.

And so this was beginning to undermine the credibility of the government, broadly speaking, not only in the eyes of Americans who had supported this war, but also in the eyes of American allies around the world, and of course in the countries where we were now fighting.

You know, I think it seeded something quite deep, a question, a doubt in the American mind, which was, if the U.S. government was wrong about something that big, about which it had been so emphatic, well, what else was it lying to people about? What else was it hiding? And that idea is—is like a cancer growing within the American consciousness, because what can be a healthy level of skepticism in one context can take on this mutant form in another moment and become this all-encompassing, self-justifying kind of delusion that everything is a lie and that nothing can be believed.

What’s the legacy of the Bush reaction to 9/11 and where we are as he leaves office, and the effect, by the way, on every president to come?

By the time—by the time Bush is leaving office in 2008, it’s been more than five years since he hung that banner that said “Mission Accomplished” behind him and declared that the combat in Iraq was over. And of course, it wasn’t over. The United States still had thousands of troops on the ground. And for Americans, this was no abstract. I mean, people knew this. They felt it in their communities. You read papers; you read stories in the local papers that described the effects on people of going back to war for a second or a third or a fourth deployment. Many people had joined the National Guard in various states expecting that they would be doing things like piling sandbags on the river in the event of a flood, and all of a sudden, they found themselves leaving their families and their businesses and going back to Iraq and Afghanistan and other countries.

In all, the—eventually the war on terror had expanded beyond Iraq and Afghanistan to encompass 12 other countries in one form or another. The United States was in permanent combat all the time, everywhere. I mean, that’s what it felt like to Americans.

By the time George Bush was leaving his presidency, he had gone from being one of the most popular presidents in American history shortly after 9/11 to being one of the most unpopular. And there was this gnawing sense among the public that people had been misled, and not only misled about the war in Iraq, but then also they’d been misled about how we might get out of there and what would happen next.

And it created this overhang that would confront every president to follow, that this war that had begun, the war on terror that had begun in the wake of 9/11 so many years earlier, had now become a permanent feature of American life, this chronic twilight war with no obvious end in sight.

So Obama comes in. He wins due to a large extent because he’s the polar opposite—or how he defines himself—to Bush, to the idea of the dark side and such. Define what he walks into and his initial thoughts, the reality, as you’ve just been talking about, that he’s living in a land that is—the landscape is much different than he ever thought because of the consequences of the decisions by Bush.

Obama had come to prominence by saying to Americans what they had really come to believe, which was that the war in Iraq was a terrible mistake. And then he finds himself inheriting that war and having to figure out how to extricate the United States. And of course it was not at all easy. There was nothing that was going to be easy about getting the United States out of Iraq or Afghanistan. He had come into office determined to figure out how he could bring the war in Iraq to a swift conclusion and to conduct what he thought of as the good war in Afghanistan, and to try to achieve some greater end, and quite quickly it became clear that both of these were much more complicated than the political rhetoric conveyed.

One of the things that he focuses on in this just war that you just defined, which is his goal, is he embraces drones. He embraces targeted assassinations by drones and use of special forces. He saw this as a just war. But what did he see? Why did he see that? And what were the unknown consequences to come?

Obama embraced some of the new technologies of what he called a just war, things like drone warfare which could reduce the risk to civilians while also reducing the exposure of American forces. But it was having an effect on the ground in places like Afghanistan that were in fact prolonging the wars because people were on the ground were being persuaded that there was this amorphous, endless sense of threat from the United States. It wasn’t—ultimately it wasn’t defusing the end of the war; the war was grinding on. And the longer it went on in Afghanistan and in Iraq, the more the effects were accumulating at home.

Great. This idea that you’re going to take out the number three power and then you take out the next number three, and then you take out the next number three, and it seemed to go on endlessly. And it gives you the ability to increase the boundaries of the war to any other country. And as terrorism is growing, because of, to some extent, a response against the propaganda that “Look what this country is doing; he’s expanding this war against Islam,” the consequences are rather dramatic.

Yeah, I mean, it really—you have this—you begin to see the third- and fourth-order consequences of 9/11, because what had begun with this attack in New York and Washington was now being finally litigated in Niger and in the—Waziristan, the farthest reaches of Afghanistan. It was just incredibly attenuated from the origins of the war on terror. But Americans, after all, were still fighting under the same joint resolution for the authorization of force that had been passed years earlier. And—but there was this, you know, I think around the world, and in the eyes of Americans, the sense that we were at war and might always be at war had taken hold, because the philosophy that you could take out the number one leader of a terrorist organizations, and then the second and the third and the fourth, it was like Sisyphus; it just went on and on and on.

And not only was it a limitless battlefield, but it was a kind of battlefield without victory because how did you know when it was going to be over? And how did you know when you would stop expending blood and treasure to try to win it?

Meanwhile, back at home, as you’ve talked about a little bit, we’re now around 2013 to 2015. You’ve got this persistence of fear. The 9/11 fear of the next attack continues.

I mean, fear is such an amazing ingredient. This goes back to your very first question of the day, which is, what was the legacy of 9/11? In the years after, there was something really distinctive that was going on in the American consciousness around fear. Historically, after a terrorist attack, Americans had tended to be afraid of terrorism, but then it tended to subside; it would go back to the historical levels. So after the attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, people had this elevated fear for a while, but then it went back to their usual level, and they sort of went back to normal life.

That didn’t happen after 9/11. It stayed elevated. Whenever they would do polls of what people were afraid and the risks they felt in their lives and to their children, it was always high. That’s partly because of what was happening in Washington, that the political leadership had incorporated the legacy of 9/11 into the daily rhetoric of politics, that you had to do things in order to protect ourselves, that we had to defend the homeland. That language was everywhere. We were being told that there were terrorist alerts and that today was an orange day or a red day. Americans were kind of swaddled in this language of fear, and it was everywhere. And you could turn on the TV and—look, the truth was that in the media, people discovered pretty quickly that a terrorist attack, no matter where it was in the world, would immediately seize people’s attention. And there was a kind of visual vocabulary that people began to recognize. You would turn on the television and see smoke rising from some shaky image in the distance and realize there had been another terrorist attack. And it was—it became a permanent feature of American public culture, I mean, the way we just thought of our days.

And it was—and it began to bleed into other things. I was reporting at gun shows, for instance, and you began to see that the language of the war on terror was becoming part of the gun culture in America. You could buy a t-shirt at a gun show that said “Waterboard Instructor.” And that was—there was something that was—it was almost like the battlefield that was limitless in the war on terror had also become limitless in the American consciousness, that we were constantly at war, not only abroad, but also increasingly within—in our own borders.

And people began to wonder, can anything—can anybody cut the knot? Can they figure out how to get through this? There was this kind of hunger for a simple solution because it all just seemed so complicated.

What this fear also did is it opened up the pocketbooks of Congress, and they fund this unbelievably huge, expensive, top-secret America, the national security establishment that starts under Bush and moves through the Obama years.

The infrastructure of the war on terror economically and in business terms was extraordinary. It was a vast new frontier of business, and defense contractors and technology companies and anybody who had some bit of relationship to these wars was growing. And Congress was funding it. I mean, just the amount of money that was coming into Washington was extraordinary. It became, in literal terms, the richest metropolitan area in the country in the years after 9/11. And it was a period in which not only were defense contractors and technology companies growing, but they created a whole set of other tertiary businesses, like lobbyists and PR firms and places where you could go when you left Congress and needed to find a new perch on K Street as a lobbyist.

So there was a whole ecosystem that was growing, and Americans were seeing some of the evidence of it. And it was becoming controversial. There was a feeling that it was corrupt, that it felt as if this moment of assault on America’s security had become a moment for political opportunism, and that was corroding America’s sense of connection to what was happening in Washington.

And when [Edward] Snowden makes his revelations, how does that tie into that anger, that fear, the fact that this vast new world that had been defined was also turned on us as well as [on] the terrorists? 33The Guardian: Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations

Snowden’s revelations gave form to something that had been abstract, this sense that the American security state was growing and that it was in fact now being deployed not only against enemies abroad, but in fact against Americans, and that people on their cell phones and sending emails were—were now suddenly in the crosshairs in some broad sense of their own government. And that generated a sense of suspicion among Americans. It was the kernel of an idea that we as citizens were somehow at odds with the government that serves in our name.

Finally on Obama, how does Obama lead to Trump?

You know, there was a pendulum effect in that Obama came to office talking about politics in very high-minded terms. It was the possibility of unity, of bringing people together. And there was a growing sense of disillusionment over those eight years, not only on the right but also on the left.

I mean, you can say that over the course of the eight years, Obama’s association with things like the surveillance state that had been exposed by Snowden and the ongoing, grinding wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had gradually corroded the confidence that he had from people, some of whom [were] even on the left, but also among Independents and on the right.

Obama had been elected with extraordinary popularity, and there was this growing sense that if a politician as intelligent and as eloquent as he is, and so obviously capable of speaking to Americans, that if he was incapable of bringing these systems under control, of ending the wars and shrinking the surveillance state, well, then no politician of any recognizable kind could do it, and maybe the answer lay outside of politics. Maybe the answer was somebody who looked nothing like Obama at all.

So Trump uses this in his campaign. He uses the 15 years of lies, the incompetence, the never-ending wars. And these are the seeds to his rise?

Donald Trump figured out very quickly that there was this reservoir of energy out there that he could tap in to. Part of it was frustration with these unwinnable wars. As he began to say, “We don’t win anymore. We don’t win.” And he had this kind of mantra of loss that tapped into this sort of shred of memory people had when it seemed as if it was easier to win wars than it was now. We were now involved in these endless, somehow unmanageable wars abroad. And Trump, with his kind of bluff, casual way of announcing that he was going to solve it as easily as he could a real estate deal, he just spoke to something that Americans, even if some of them knew he’s making this up, there was just this hunger for a simplistic answer to a hard problem, and he was willing to provide it.

The other thing was that over the course of those eight years, I think it’s kind of just worth mentioning that, you know, over the course of Obama’s presidency, the fact that he represented the first Black president in American history had begun to stir these forces in politics, that you began to see the resurgence of far-right organizations, of militias.

When Donald Trump emerged on the scene, that far-right fringe, which had been growing off the stage for a while, suddenly became important—not only to him politically. It was also then energized by his victory, and he became the organizing principle that would pull all of these other elements of American politics suddenly onto the main stage.

How does Trump see a post-9/11 world differently than how Bush and Obama did? Is that defined by how he handles his foreign affairs, foreign policy, which was a rejection in some ways of what Obama and Bush had done?

Obama and Bush had spent years trying to shore up the support of American allies around the world and the idea that our greatest strength as a country was being in these close, trusted relationships abroad, in our bases and in our alliances, in NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization]. Donald Trump said something very different. He said in fact those alliances, those bases, they’re exploitative; they’re making us weaker, and we should withdraw within our own borders. We should pull away from our allies. We should challenge them. We should ask them to pay us money for sending American troops abroad and that—he created a sense in our minds that it was us against the world. And when I say “us,” it wasn’t all Americans, because of course he was constantly identifying Americans within who he described as enemies of various kinds—the press or Democrats. But it was in fact this much smaller group of true believers, the people who heard his message and believed it most ardently. That was what he gave people, was this sense that they were in this mighty struggle and a noble struggle against people who had been described in the past as their friends and allies, but were in fact villains.

As Trump's term is coming closer to end, though he doesn’t know it yet, his inability to disentangle himself from the same wars, in some ways how he duplicates the same efforts that Obama had been involved in and Bush to some extent, the inability to pull out of Afghanistan, sort of negotiating with the Taliban. But overall, the Trump war legacy post-9/11?

After four years, Donald Trump had discovered something like what his predecessors had discovered, which is that it’s very easy to announce that you’re going to be able to get out of these wars, but it’s very difficult to actually do it. And he found himself still embroiled in this war in Afghanistan, still contending with the remnants of ISIS and the wars in Syria and Iraq. And at the same time, he’s continued to use the tools that were created after 9/11, like drone warfare. In fact, he had elevated and expanded the use of drones over his term.

And so by the end, he was the third American president to have been fighting this war on terror, and it was, in its own way, grinding on just as it had been in previous presidencies.

In 2020, as the campaign is going on and the election is coming up, he focuses again on the war at home. But the enemy now in his war on terrorism is not Al Qaeda or ISIS; it’s antifa, and it’s Black demonstrators. And he uses the same tools created for the war on terrorism. He uses DHS forces. He uses the military in demonstrations, those National Guard helicopters over the heads of the demonstrators in Washington, D.C. He sees this as the existential threat, and he sells that to his followers, that this is the war that we need to fight. Talk about the significance of that and the effect of that.

Donald Trump marshaled all of the imagery and the language of 20 years of warfare in service of now a domestic fight.

Trump publicly and privately talked about the Black Lives Matter movement and the political challenges to his presidency as if it was warfare. I mean, he would describe it as being in an existential fight for survival. And he talked about the idea that there are forces within, radicals, socialists, leftists who are seeking to undo our way of life.

He gave a speech at the foot of Mount Rushmore in which he was describing what was happening in the country as a threat to America’s survival in a way that sounded quite resonant with the way that Americans had talked about the threat 20 years earlier after 9/11. But of course, now it was being described as, it was your neighbor and it was the people across the aisle in politics; those were the people who were threatening America’s safety.

And so the sense that this period had begun with a limitless battlefield had now taken on a whole new quality, because it was now right up to the door of the White House. It was in the center of American towns and cities where people were marching against racial injustice. But in his language, this was a threat every bit as grave as the threat America had faced on 9/11.

You were there on Jan. 6. Talk about who these people were, how they saw themselves as patriots, they saw themselves as equal or the same type of patriots as the people who brought down Flight 93 20 years before when Al Qaeda was trying to take down that Capitol that they go marching into.

When you talked to people on the grounds around the Capitol, you got the sense that there was pride in the way they talked about it, because they felt as if they were, in a sense, the natural heirs to a legacy of American bravery, which they associated with things like Flight 93 in which the passengers had risen up against terrorists to protect themselves. And they cloaked themselves there as they were preparing to storm the Capitol. They really cloaked themselves in that language of revolution and of self-protection and of a heroic American identity in which nobody will ever help us but ourselves.

And you know, they associated themselves all the way back with the American Revolution, but then all the way as recently as the, you know, the events of 9/11. And what was most striking about it was how much they didn’t—they weren’t hiding; they weren’t ashamed. They were taking videos of themselves precisely because they thought they were doing something—they thought they were doing something noble. They thought they were doing something right, because within the confines of the world Trump had created, attacking the U.S. Capitol was actually as noble as defending yourself against Osama bin Laden and his terrorists on 9/11.

But the irony of the fact that for 20 years we had been selling the idea that we were bringing democratic values to countries around the world, especially in the Middle East, that we were bringing elections to people so that they could have a democratic society themselves, and where we have the American public now trying to stop an election because of what President Trump had told them?

For 20 years, the language of democracy and nobility and patriotism had been used constantly, and distorted, every little bit, tiny steps along the way, until it became this utterly unrecognizable combination of qualities in which the patriotic thing to do, the democratic thing to do was to attack the U.S. Congress on a day when it was certifying the peaceful demonstration of democracy.

It was like the entire legacy of those wars and the disillusion that had come out of the decisions behind the wars, all of it had come together because people felt as if they were the true bearers of reality; that they felt as if the government that they had trusted at various points along the way had disappointed them. They were disillusioned, and they were—you know, they had—he had created for them a fantasy that allowed them to feel as if they were finally defending themselves against all of the things that had assaulted them, going back to the morning of Sept. 11.

Let’s finalize this with a couple of questions about Biden. The country that he inherits, after 20 years, much more divided, with forever wars, with democratic institutions damaged and U.S. power and moral authority in the world being questioned. A huge loss of trust in governments and institutions and the Congress and the White House. Describe the country that he inherits.

Yeah. I mean, Biden, you know, in much the same way that—well, Biden came into office at a moment when America’s trust in its government was at historic lows. The faith that Americans had in the presidency had been really damaged over the course of four years, but really over a longer period than that, and—I’m trying to think how to be more specific.

One of the things Biden said was—Biden came in, and he—in a sense, Biden was contending with a set of conditions, almost like a battlefield of its own, in the mind of the American voter, which was, was there anything that was worth trusting again? Could people actually be summoned together rather than driven apart? And his language struck a lot of people in politics as naïve when he started talking about bringing people together. But he did—he seemed to have recognized something that Americans didn’t yet have a way of describing, which was there was this hunger to be unified to some degree, to at least believe in the possibility that that could be doable again.

And every time he would talk about the possibility of bringing Americans together, he would qualify it by recognizing how difficult it was. But I mean, to be specific, Donald—sorry.

When Joe Biden was inaugurated, he said that he was putting his whole soul, as he put it, into bringing Americans together. And it was soaring language. It sort of appealed to that thing that Americans still had, that kernel of an idea which, after all, had been so present on 9/11, that moment that Americans were unified in that period, and that through trial we could find some sense of connection with one another again.

But it’s fragile. It’s a very fragile idea. And in Biden’s case, you know, he tried to appeal to these earlier moments of trial to the—to the Great Depression and to the war—you know, to the war in Europe, to World War II. And he was trying in some ways to remind Americans of what it could feel like to be engaged in a unified, noble purpose. But it’s an object of aspiration. He’s not describing a reality. He’s describing what he hopes to create, because the reality, of course, is deeply, deeply divided.

Is the United States weaker today than it was on 9/11?

I think by any reasonable accounting, the United States is weaker today than it was on 9/11. The economy is—the United States, you know, has accumulated extraordinary debts. It has deferred maintenance on its own infrastructure for decades. It has allowed the gap between rich and poor, driven partly by the decisions that were made after 9/11 to lower interest rates, all of those have contributed to extraordinary stresses within the American economy, and also within—within the mind of America’s collective consciousness.

In some ways, America 20 years after 9/11 has lost a lot. It’s lost the credibility of its military ventures abroad. It’s lost the confidence of its allies in NATO and elsewhere around the world. But really the hardest thing to recover may be the sense among its own people that they are joined together in a common enterprise, that they can be unified against threats from abroad and also within. That has been broken. And it wasn’t broken on one day or overnight; it was broken over the course of years of choices, of how we would use American power, how we would talk about it, how we would talk about ourselves and our neighbors, who we would allow onto our shores and how we would protect people or not protect people. But the cumulative effect was that we created a sense of ourselves that is in its own way we feel more at risk today, more threatened today than we did 20 years ago, on the day when we were in fact attacked.