The architect of the September 11 attacks dreamed of the destruction of America. In the last 25 years, his wish has come true.
President Donald Trump has refused to attend the ceremony at Ground Zero marking the 25th anniversary of the Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center — reportedly because he wanted to deliver a speech, and the annual event has long barred remarks by politicians. Trump, a native New Yorker who has often employed 9/11 as a rhetorical device, will instead head to the Pentagon, which was also attacked that day, where he can rant, rave, bellow, and bemoan whatever he is worked up about. He may, in the process, also pay cursory tribute to the victims in an aside.“We recall the light of America’s best and bravest and the love that they showed in their final moments,” Trump said during last year’s 9/11 remembrance at the Pentagon. That, however, was scripted pablum. It’s far more illustrative to “recall” Trump’s thoughts on the attack on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, when New Yorkers were united in grief. Well, most of them .
Asked about the Trump Building at 40 Wall Street during a live TV interview that clear and cloudless afternoon, Trump took the opportunity to tout the increased standing that his building had just gained from the devastating terrorist attack. Trump made certain to note that his building “actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest.” Like Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Trump then took his own 9/11 victory lap. “When they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest,” he observed of 40 Wall Street. “And now it’s the tallest.” Like innumerable Trump statements in the 25 years since, it was callous and cringe-worthy and, of course, untrue. Nearby 70 Pine Street was actually taller.
Twenty-five years ago, I could not have imagined, as I watched the Twin Towers topple, that the New York real estate buffoon who used 9/11 to aggrandize his property’s height would become America’s president. And if you told me Trump’s supporters would attack the Capitol — something Al Qaeda tried and failed to do on 9/11 — to subvert the democratic process, that the insurrection would fail but that Trump would still be reelected, I would have laughed. But that and so much else came to pass, as the danger posed by Trump surpassed Al Qaeda and every other foreign threat to America. Bin Laden is long gone, but his spiritual successor remains ensconced in the White House. The Al Qaeda leader couldn’t have hoped for better.
Nick Turse Nick Turse is a senior reporter at The Intercept and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves.