“The country has never faced anything like this in its 250-year history,” former Judge J. Michael Lutting told CNN Monday morning. He was referring to a new article he wrote for The New Republic, outlining a nightmare scenario: What if Trump and the Republicans lose the House but refuse to concede?

When Congress assembles for its required first meeting on January 3, what if Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, in preparation for this first meeting, dismisses the current Clerk of the House and appoints a MAGA stooge instead—and then that stooge calls the names of elected Republicans but (perhaps on the ground that President Donald Trump says the elections were rigged) refuses to call the names of newly elected Democratic Representatives? Only Republicans—or at least a Republican majority—would be seated, would re-elect Johnson as Speaker, and proceed to serve the White House. This, he says, would be the “final battle in Trump’s determined war to corrupt America’s democracy.”

Luttig, a man of impeccable conservative credentials—he clerked for then-Judge Scalia, served in the Reagan White House Counsel’s office, and played a significant role in the brutal fight over confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Court. He was frequently mentioned as a possible Justice under a future Republican president. He is also an acute student of the Constitution, congressional procedure, and the multiple authoritarian threads of Trumpism. He deserves credit for quickly recognizing the danger of Trump’s rise to power. The scenario he outlines could happen.

Indeed, Luttig, to the contrary notwithstanding, it already has happened, not once but twice, in 1863 and 1865—and both times it brought American democracy to the brink of collapse, and indeed on one occasion brought federal troops into the Capitol itself on a mission to block a conservative coup.

I came across the story some years ago, while researching my book, Democracy Reborn, a narrative of the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment. That framing took place in the late winter of 1865 and the spring of 1866, and it was the endpoint of a series of hair’s-breadth escapes for democracy from the forces of the Slave Power and its northern allies, who actively sought to subvert the Union war effort and deliver a post-Appomattox victory to pro-slavery forces.

The first episode occurred in December 1863, after the Union was defeated at the polls nearly as badly as at First and Second Bull Run. On election day in 1862, the Civil War effort was going badly, and the fall midterms produced disaster for the healthy Republican majority elected to the House in 1860. Capitalizing on public disgust, the Democrats gained a whopping 27 seats, bringing them within 15 seats of the Republicans who had won the House two years earlier. This produced a rarity in American history: a genuine plot for a coup d’etat, engineered by none other than the Clerk of the House, a Democrat named Emerson Etheridge, a holdover from the days when pro-slavery forces ruled the House, who made it known that he had a plan. On the first day of the House, he would skip a few names—just enough to produce a “membership” with a Democratic majority. A Democratic speaker, S.S. “Sunset” Cox, would take control and the Republicans would be shut out of power in the House.

The plan leaked. It turned out that not every Northern Democrat had the stomach, or the devotion to slavery, needed to overturn an American election. Emerson called his truncated roll, omitting 16 Republicans who he claimed had not presented valid credentials. Representative Thaddeus Stevens, a leading Radical Republican, immediately moved that the omitted names be called. Because some opposition members stayed loyal to the Constitution, the House narrowly voted to seat the omitted members, and the crisis passed.

But what was not generally known at the time was that the plot would have been foiled—even, if necessary, by bayonets. Lincoln had dispatched troops, who were concealed inside the Capitol, ready to occupy the House chamber. As president, he had sent young soldiers into battle, where many were slaughtered for the Union cause; he seemed to be sanguine at the prospect of battle reaching the Capitol itself. He told one of his allies, “If Mr. Etheridge undertakes revolutionary proceedings, let him be carried out on a chip, and let our men organize the House.”

So passed the first crisis; but by the time the second one arrived, Lincoln was dead, and the House clerkship was firmly in loyal hands. Nonetheless, the roll call of the 39^th Congress was almost as dramatic—and constituted an even narrower escape for the Union. This came in December 1865, in a vastly different political landscape. Democrats still plotted to secure victory for the forces of Southern slavery. This time they had an ally in the White House, and Republicans had one in the House Clerk’s office.

Andrew Johnson, who succeeded to the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, was a Southerner who remained loyal to the Union—but who in every other aspect would have made a better president for the Confederacy. A former slaveowner, he was flamboyantly racist and aggressively authoritarian. He had taken upon himself to reconstruct the Union according to his own preferences. Soon after entering the White House, Johnson ordered the former Confederate states to hold new elections for Congress—using the old all-white voting rolls assembled before Appomattox. Not surprisingly, this lily-white electorate chose a number of former Confederates—at least four had served in the Confederate “House,” and as many as 58 Representatives-elect had worn grey uniforms. If these new members took their seats, “Reconstruction,” as we have learned about it, would never have happened. Slavery would have been preserved in all but name, and the Slave Power would march into the capital over the graves of 360,000 Union soldiers slain in the war. Once control of Congress was secured, “the political power of the country will pass into the hands of the South,” chortled the pro-slavery Richmond Examiner, “aided as it will be by northern alliances. The South claims that this will be the fact, and the North does not dispute it.”

Congressional Republicans, however, had taken steps after the near disaster of 1863: The new Clerk of the House, Edward McPherson, was not only a former Republican member of the House but also a former law pupil of Radical mastermind Stevens. When it came time to call the roll, McPherson ignored the neo-Confederates from the South: “The clerk rules, as a matter of order, that he cannot recognize any gentleman whose name is not upon his roll.” When Democrats objected, the answer was stubbornly based on the rules of order rather than vote totals. The plot to re-Southernize Congress collapsed. Since then, clerks have called the roll of the House without sweeping exclusions.

It’s hard to know what conclusion to draw from this history, except to note that a democratic government, even one with a 250-year history behind it, may be rickety. Presidents, senators, House speakers may proclaim democratic principles—but a system where obscure figures like House clerks renounce their constitutional loyalty may not survive, nonetheless.

Will the Constitution face such a near-death experience on January 3? How many House Republicans would be willing to follow Donald Trump and Mike Johnson and violate their constitutional oaths? How many Republicans might seize the opportunity to rid themselves of both figures, who are, behind closed doors, not terribly popular? If the House Republicans try to steal the majority, will Democrats turn to the Supreme Court? The Court’s majority has been inconstant—having granted Trump criminal immunity, it has also blocked some of his most outrageous power grabs. If the Luttig scenario plays out, the Court’s majority will be forced to choose once and for all.

The post Can the House Clerk Lead a Midterm Coup? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks has passed, marked by solemn remembrances and harrowing footage. Fond memories of President George W. Bush lifting America’s spirits atop the World Trade Center rubble through a bullhorn and with a World Series first pitch strike at Yankee Stadium leavened the commemoration’s sadness. The words “never forget” rang throughout the day. 

But we have forgotten the main strategic blunder by the Bush administration that left America vulnerable to a major terrorist attack. We have forgotten it because we never had much of an opportunity to remember it.  

For a few weeks in the spring of 2002, the public was stunned by the news that President Bush received a memo one month and five days before the attack titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” The New York Post ran the sensationalist headline “Bush Knew” on its cover.  

But the public’s interest in the White House’s mishandling of counterterrorism before 9/11 quickly faded after Bush, hoping to move past the controversy, proposed the creation of a Department of Homeland Security to better prevent future terrorist attacks. This was a flip-flop, as Bush had publicly opposed the Democratic idea on the grounds it was unnecessary bureaucracy. His initial opposition was soon forgotten; in the November 2002 midterms, Republicans would soon attack Democrats who demanded labor protections for the new department’s workforce as soft on terrorism. 

Bush’s dismissive response to the briefer who provided the memo—“All right. You’ve covered your ass now”—was indicative of a deeper strategic failure: His administration did not believe counterterrorism was as important as national missile defense. In fact, during the 48 hours before Al Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Bush administration was amid a coordinated campaign to convince the public and Congress that the federal government already spends enough on counterterrorism and not enough on national missile defense.  

The Bush administration first embarked on its wayward path on February 8, 2001, when it previewed for The New York Times plans for a comprehensive national security review, including a “commitment to building a defensive missile shield” which would necessitate withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Treaty with Russia. The president made this objective plain in a May 1 address: “We need a new framework that allows us to build missile defenses to counter the different threats of today’s world. To do so, we must move beyond the constraints of the 30-year-old ABM Treaty.” 

The following week, Senator Fred Dalton Thompson, a Tennessee Republican and a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, penned an op-ed in support of national missile defense that pushed back on Democratic critics:  

Opponents of NMD also cite the threat posed by “suitcase bombs” and other means as the ones requiring greater emphasis. We all agree that the United States should seek to counter the threat posed by terrorists armed with a weapon of mass destruction. This is why we spend more than $11 billion a year to deal with the threat of terrorist attacks. At the same time, though, the $2 billion we spend annually on missile defense is wholly inadequate for addressing the rapidly growing threat of a missile attack. 

The $11 billion talking point would become a favorite of the Bush administration, implying that a greater emphasis on counterterrorism was unnecessary because we already spent plenty on it, unlike missile defenses. 

By August, Democrats were sounding the alarm that the Bush administration’s priorities were backward. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, the South Dakota Democrat, in a foreign policy address, warned: 

The chief threat to America is not from big, lumbering ICBMs, launched with a clear return address. The chief threats today come from biological and chemical weapons and bombs that could be smuggled in a cargo container, bus, or backpack. They come from attacks to our economic infrastructure — the computer systems, communications networks and power grids on which America is dependent. They come from terrorists who do not have the infrastructure to launch ICBMs, and who leave no return address. National Missile Defense is the most expensive possible response to the least likely threat we face. 

Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat, echoed that argument on CNN: 

The issue is whether or not the unilateral ripping up a treaty which provides for some arms reductions will make us more secure or less secure. And if we unilaterally deploy that system, we could very well be at a greater danger. The greatest threat to us [is] the terrorist who could use a truck, who could use a ship, who could use a suitcase against us. That system does nothing for that. 

Then on Sunday, September 9, the debate escalated as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took direct aim at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair, a guy named Joe Biden.  

Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, the Delaware Democrat said: 

Missile defense would protect us from virtually nothing. It will not protect us from cruise missiles. It will not protect us from something being smuggled in. It will not protect us from an atom bomb in the rusty hull of a ship coming into a harbor. It will not protect us from anthrax … all of which the Defense Department says are much more likely, much more likely threats than somebody sending an ICBM with a return address on it, saying, we just struck you, knowing that’ll result in immediate annihilation. 

Rumsfeld shot back on CNN, leaning on the $11 billion talking point: 

Senator Biden is against missile defense. One might ask him, why did they have those metal detectors at the Senate Office Building? They don’t protect you from a truck bomb. They don’t protect you from a cruise missile, but why do you have them? Well, you have them because you’ve learned that there are a spectrum of threats that can damage the American people and damage our country. And what you need to do is try to deal with as many as you can. That’s why the United States spends so much money on the things he’s talking about on: terrorists. We spend $11 billion trying to deal with terrorism and force protection. 

The following day, Biden kept the argument going in an address to the National Press Club:

…even the Joint Chiefs says that a strategic nuclear attack is less likely than a regional conflict, a major theater war, terrorist attacks at home or abroad, or any number of other real issues. We’ll have diverted all that money to address the least likely threat, while the real threat comes to this country in the hold of a ship, the belly of a plane, or smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial, in a backpack…  

Bush’s National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, was to further engage the debate in a September 11 address to the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. Her prepared remarks extended the argument that counterterrorism work was already well funded, while we lacked investment in missile defenses. “We need to worry about the suitcase bomb, the car bomb and the vial of sarin released in the subway,” Rice was going to say, “[But] why put deadbolt locks on your doors and stock up on cans of mace and then decide to leave your windows open?” Upon discovering the remarks in 2004, The Washington Post reported, “Rice intended to point out that the United States had spent $11 billion on counterterrorism, about twice as much as it spent on missile defense, during the previous year, although the speech did not point out that that was when President Bill Clinton was still in office.” 

Rice never delivered the speech. Instead, she spent part of September 11 in a bunker.  

The terrorist attack masterminded by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network traumatized the nation. It led to a more aggressive counterterrorist surveillance operation, which—while not beginning on sound legal ground—has remained in place beyond the Bush administration with Congressional approval and has been proven effective. And, as noted above, Bush did create the Department of Homeland Security, but this is an agency that has largely lost the plot and, under Donald Trump, became grossly sidetracked with his mass deportation agenda. 

Otherwise, the 9/11 attacks did not prompt much rethinking of national security priorities from the Bush administration. The Bush administration launched a war on Al Qaeda’s home base of Afghanistan, but refrained from pursuing bin Laden when he fled to Pakistan. As noted in the recent Washington Monthly review of Peter Bergen’s All the Presidents’ Wars: Twenty-Five Years of America’s War on Terror, Rumsfeld told Bush administration officials soon after 9/11, “Don’t over-elevate the importance of Al Qaeda” and “there just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan.”  

However, Bush had eyed Iraq for attack from the beginning of his administration, directing Rumsfeld to review military options. In contrast, Secretary of State Colin Powell reviewed options for sanctions at his first National Security Council meeting in late January. Six months later, Rumsfeld distributed a memo to Rice, Powell, and Vice President Dick Cheney, warning that “within a few years the U.S. will undoubtedly have to confront a Saddam [Hussein] armed with nuclear weapons” since “sanctions don’t work over extended periods” and suggested exploring whether “our moderate Arab friends … are willing to engage in a more robust policy.” Hours after the 9/11 attack, Rumsfeld instructed his aides to develop attack plans for Iraq, which was convenient since two weeks later Bush privately directed Rumsfeld, “I want you to develop a plan to invade Iraq.”  

That plan was executed, disastrously. The Bush administration’s claims that Iraq was behind 9/11 and possessed weapons of mass destruction were proven false after dismissing intelligence and inspection reports saying otherwise, laying waste to American credibility. Saddam Hussein was toppled, but Al Qaeda remnants poured in and, following Barack Obama’s withdrawal of troops, established a caliphate in part of the country for several years. The resulting Iraqi government was democratic yet sectarian, with Shia Muslim factions that are close to Iran’s theocratic authoritarian regime.  

Bush also stuck with his missile defense plans, unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty three months after 9/11. While not as visible a failure as the Iraq war, it is nevertheless a failure. After spending $280 billion, we have a national missile defense system with barely more than a 50 percent success rate in tests. Meanwhile, freed from the treaty, Russia has expanded its nuclear arsenal and sparked an arms race including China.  

Trump’s response is to pursue another fanciful missile defense plan, “Golden Dome,” estimated to cost $1.2 trillion over 20 years. A recent Brookings Institution analysis concludes, “such a massive system would not only verge on unaffordable; it could cause an arms race without providing the actual protection it promises.” Furthermore, “the laws of physics still dramatically challenge and constrain what a missile defense system might realistically achieve.”  

And with striking similarities to Bush’s ill-considered, strategically counterproductive war with Iraq, Trump barreled into war with Iran over fears of weapons of mass destruction, shunning diplomatic opportunities for containment involving aggressive inspections, and is now locked in a stalemate disrupting the global economy and weakening American influence.  

In other words, we’ve learned nothing because we forgot.  

The post Never Forgetting 9/11 Means Learning Lessons  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

A new survey finds that 18 percent of voters who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election now say they regret their vote. 

Many of these voters come from groups that swung toward Republicans in the last election, including young people, Black and Hispanic voters, and moms. 

What drove these voters to change their mind about Trump? And how much could this shift benefit Democrats in this fall’s midterms? 

Tina Tang, Director of Polling and Analytics for Navigator Research, explains that while affordability and the economy are the top concerns of these “Trump regretters,” they don’t trust either party to deliver. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes. 

***

Anne Kim: How important are these “Trump regretters”? Are they a big enough bloc to make the difference this fall in some key races?

Tina Tang: We saw that nearly half the people who said that they regret voting for Trump would want to go back and change their vote if they could. So if you look at the total electorate of Trump voters, that’s about one in ten Trump voters. That’s a significant bloc of folks. 

We’ve been tracking over the last year or so how this Trump regret number has changed, and we’ve seen consistently it’s about one in five people that are continuing to regret their vote. 

Anne Kim: So who are these Trump regretters then? What share of them are loosely connected to the Republican Party, and what share of them are people like Marjorie Taylor Greene—i.e., die-hard MAGA people who became disillusioned. 

Tina Tang: This was the most fun part for me, digging into this survey. So there were a lot of think pieces that came out after 2024 about the growing share of young Americans that are throwing their support behind Trump. And we saw that about 30 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds who voted for Trump in 2024 now regret their vote. This is, I believe, triple the number of folks who are over 55, and about double the folks who are in the 35 to 54 range. We also saw a pretty large number of black and Latino American—about one in three—compared to just about 16 percent of white Americans. We also saw that about a quarter of independents and non-MAGA Republicans now regret their vote. And this is especially high for independent men—around 37 percent. That’s obviously a key part of the Trump coalition all the time. And then we also saw that about 22 percent of moms now regret their vote compared to just about 11 percent of dads. That was one of the more interesting points that for me when I was digging into the data.

Anne Kim: That’s super interesting. It probably ties into the fraying of the MAHA coalition that people are also talking about. Did you see much movement among the folks who identify themselves as MAGA? I’m assuming that that percentage is small, but I’m wondering if it’s meaningful.

Tina Tang: We didn’t see meaningful movement in terms of the base MAGA coalition. But I think what is important is looking at the independents and the non-MAGA coalition. These are folks who aren’t completely sold on the MAGA vision and now, because of the war, because of rising costs, are starting to that maybe they didn’t make the right choice.

The other piece that we hear a lot from Trump regretters, especially from non-MAGA and independents in our focus groups, is this feeling of feeling “duped.” I hear that word come up all the time. “I thought I voted for lower costs, and I thought I voted for somebody to fix inflation, and I thought I voted for somebody to not start any more new wars.” One quote that has always stood out to me is someone who told us earlier this year that they voted for no new wars, and now Trump is starting wars both abroad and in America. 

Anne Kim: Another thing that really jumps out from your survey is that these Trump regretters have not only soured on Trump, they’ve really, really soured on him even compared to the overall population. It seems they’re super negative about the economy and especially about their own finances. And I wonder if you could give a few more details about that.

Tina Tang: [Among] the folks who are regretting their vote for Trump, one of the top reasons they cite is cost. They’re more likely than Americans overall to feel like their personal finances are not in a good place. They’re also more likely than Americans overall to feel that the economy is worse off now than it has been before, and that Trump is not doing a good job on a range of cost issues from gas costs to grocery costs to health care costs. 

Anne Kim: I’m curious about whether these very negative perceptions are the result of what’s happened relative to their expectations versus an absolute change in their circumstances. I know that that’s not what your survey looked at, but I am of curious to know if these voters are more low income than other folks or who maybe have been personally injured by what’s been happening with Medicaid or other safety net programs.

Tina Tang: We don’t look at that specifically in our survey, but I think one of the things that really does stand out is the fact that these folks are feeling extremely negatively about their personal financial situations. Earlier this year we did a survey where we looked at people who are changing their habits because of financial circumstances, and we found that nearly one in ten Americans are selling blood plasma to make ends meet. 

Anne Kim: Wow.

Tina Tang: While that’s not part of the same data set, that is just one statistic to show how dire financial situations are. 

People are feeling like they were promised better, and now they can’t achieve their version of the American Dream because of the current administration.

Anne Kim: Let’s move to the more cautionary phase of this discussion. Democrats hearing this may think, wow, this is really going to be changing the fortunes of the party. But I think one of the interesting things you found in your survey is that the issues that are most outraging to a lot of Democrats and many progressives are not the top reasons cited by Trump regretters about why they regret their vote, such as what’s happening on immigration, or Trump’s mental capacity to serve. 

What does that tell you about who these voters are and the caution that Democrats should have about making any assumptions that Trump regretters share their outrage about what’s happening with ICE, or with corruption, or so many other things that, you know, animate the folks on Blue Sky?

Tina Tang: One of the biggest things I would ask folks to remember is that we have to talk about things that are part of people’s lived everyday experiences. People don’t wake up every morning and go on Twitter to see what Trump might have said that day, and they don’t wake up every morning or go to bed at night thinking about know Trump said this, or he’s not mentally well. 

They’re going to bed thinking, “How do I put food on the table? How do I provide for my kids? How do I provide for my parents?” People are taking care of their families, taking care of their communities. We have to talk about the things that are impacting their day-to-day, and costs are by far the number one thing we hear people talk about as their biggest worry every day.

One of our favorite tracking questions is to ask Americans what they want the president and Congress to focus on, and then we ask what they think Trump and Republicans in Congress are focused on. We often see this big gap in focus because what they want their leaders to focus on is things like inflation, the cost of living, jobs, economy, health care. And what they think the current administration is spending their time on is things like foreign conflicts and immigration. 

Anne Kim: That question, however, also asked respondents what they thought Democrats were focusing on, and there appeared to be a significant disconnect there as well, as I recall. It looked as if voters perceived Democrats to be focusing more on culture war stuff than on the issues they’re concerned about, if I remember correctly.

Tina Tang: We do often see that reflected in our data as well. Some of the things that they perceive Democrats to be focused on are some of the more culture war stuff that you mentioned, but also things like health care. I think Democrats have staked a strong position on health care over the last several years or decades, and that has continued to be something that people associate with Democrats. I think it’s a strong lane for Democrats to continue to message on. 

One piece of the cautionary tale of our data is a lot of these voters, and we’ve been talking about Trump regretters specifically, don’t really trust either party to handle a range of different issues.

So I think the cautionary tale coming out of this is that just because they regret voting for Trump doesn’t mean that they automatically trust Democrats more to handle cost issues or health care. A majority of them don’t trust either party. They just think their leaders don’t get it. And we hear this in focus groups all the time, that they feel like their elected leaders just don’t understand where they’re coming from.

Anne Kim: One thing that was disappointing to me is to see that neither party is trusted on the issue of corruption. And that was surprising to me because that is an issue that a lot of Democrats have been bringing up. And it is one of the things that you would think that people would be especially outraged about, especially when there is an outrage a day about various conflicts of interest or corruption or self-dealing. But especially with the Trump regretters, that issue ranked low in the hierarchy of concerns.

Tina Tang: In our data we saw that about 65 percent don’t trust either party on corruption issues. For Americans overall, corruption is usually in the top five issues that people want their leaders to focus on, so it’s high on the list, but behind things like cost of living and health care, which we tend to see always ranked number one and two.

Some of our most recent polling showed that voters are seeing the cost of corruption. One of the things that we hear a lot in focus groups is that people, unprompted, would bring up the ballroom all the time.

People would say, “I can’t put food on the table, but they’re building this giant ballroom. I’m never going to get to go to the ballroom, so what does this do for me as an American?” We hear a lot about the ballroom, the arch, all of these things that are happening in D.C., the vanity projects. I think that’s the best angle to talk about corruption issues.

Anne Kim: If you were to give advice to Democrats, how would you go about reaching disaffected Trump voters, especially since your survey also found that a lot of them intend to continue voting for Republicans?

Tina Tang: We do a lot of research on news consumption at Navigator—how folks are getting their news—and something that was interesting about the Trump regretter group is that they tended to be more active news consumers than Americans overall. 

These are folks who are going out and getting informed and actively seeking out information about Trump and his policies. 

How best to communicate to these voters is to be in the spaces that they are. These are folks who are actively seeking out more political news. So [Democrats] have to be there to provide the information, whether it’s on health care, whether it’s on the economy, whether it’s the fact that all the tariffs that have been happening recently with Canada are going to raise people’s costs. I think these are things that Trump regretters are following. 

The post Who Are the “Trump Regretters”?  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For more than 30 years, Representative Barney Frank was one of the nation’s most visible liberal lawmakers.  

The Massachusetts Democrat who died earlier this year was the first member of the House to come out publicly as gay, and the first in Congress to marry a same-sex partner. He fought for funding to combat AIDS, helped end the ban on openly gay members in the military (the policy known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”), and pushed to pass legislation expanding the federal definition of hate crimes to include acts based on gender, sexual orientation, and disability.  

Frank also led the biggest overhaul of the nation’s financial system since the New Deal. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, he brought a renegade banking industry to heel as co-author of the eponymous Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Among other reforms, the legislation tightened federal oversight and created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which the Trump administration has tried to dismantle).  

Given his legacy of tenacious advocacy to advance progressive ideals, the opening of Frank’s posthumous new book is jarring:  

Mea culpa.  

This book seeks to undo the damage inflicted by a tragic historical irony. Well-intentioned but deeply flawed choices made by those most deeply committed to liberal values—my fellow and sister members of the democratic left—are largely responsible for the political strength that xenophobic populism has come to enjoy in the developed world.

Frank, who died in May at age 86, had begun to hint at his repudiation of the left when he entered hospice care this spring for congestive heart failure and revealed to journalists he was writing a final polemic. (The Atlantic called Frank’s stand against his party’s progressive wing a “second coming-out.”) The result is a slim volume: The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy.  

Written in the blunt and acerbic style that defined his political persona, The Hard Path to Unity is an unsparing and timely indictment of the ascendant left that all liberals would do well to read—and heed. Left unchallenged, Frank warns, left-wing dominance of the Democratic Party will doom it to political failure, thereby leaving Trumpist populism unchecked. Through its insistence on unrealistic ideals (and its ironic intolerance of differing viewpoints), Frank argues that progressives risk losing everything they purport to champion. Especially counterproductive, he writes, is the left’s vociferous advocacy of proposals like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, which he characterizes as “voter repelling.”  

Not that the center escapes unscathed. In Frank’s view, the original sin belongs to “establishment” centrists, whose policies helped set Trumpism in motion in the first place. During the 1990s, moderates like President Bill Clinton rushed to embrace globalization and free trade without sufficient care for the Americans left behind. “The mainstream insisted that tackling the problem of inequality should be deferred until pro-globalization policies were entrenched,” he writes. The ensuing catastrophic loss in manufacturing jobs—coupled with rising prosperity for the urban and well-educated—catalyzed white working-class resentment. But while the left correctly identifies the problem, Frank argues, its diagnosis and remedies are flawed—intellectually, ideologically, and tactically.  

Frank finds the entire premise of the leftist cause logically sloppy: It conflates economic grievance with social injustice and assumes solidarity based on common victimhood. But as Frank points out, experiencing racism is not the same as losing a job to NAFTA. Though the “arithmetic is impeccable,” Frank writes, “the differing causes of each group’s victimization mean that different and sometimes conflicting remedies are required to reach the sections of the two cohorts that fall outside the overlap area in their Venn diagram of discontent.”  

Policies like the Green New Deal, for instance, demand yet more sacrifice from working-class Americans who feel that they’ve already lost plenty, thereby deepening their anger instead of mollifying it. The same goes for ideas like “Defunding the Police” and “Open Borders” (to use Frank’s familiar taxonomy), which aggravate working-class anxieties of a society under siege. “As it has been executed by its advocates, the leftward-most strategy deepens the fault lines that separate those discontented with democracy due to economic disparities from those who are primarily upset and motivated by reasons related to social justice,” Frank writes. 

He reserves his harshest condemnation for the ideological rigidity of the left and its penchant for firebombing candidates not in lockstep with their agenda:  

If there were to be a competition for the dumbest, most counterproductive voting behavior in American history since secession in 1861 … a strong case can be made for awarding first place … to voters who rejected [Kamala] Harris out of a conviction that the Biden administration did too little to combat climate change.  

Leftist suppression of robust debate, Frank argues, is both substantively and tactically shortsighted. First, by tarring all critics as “sell-outs” beholden to the rich, the left cuts off avenues for productive discussion and the development of new ideas. “Intra-party debates about the merits of various policy proposals or the mood of the electorate get displaced by attacks on each other’s motives, intensified by the familiar human propensity to react more angrily to heresy than to outright disbelief,” he writes.  

Second, the insistence on ideological conformity is a recipe for political suicide. Leftist fury has cowed many moderates into silence, for fear of inflaming internal divisions that weaken the overall cause against the right. But this, Frank argues, has had exactly the effect that party leaders had hoped to avoid: It allows the left to define the party through the prism of its unpopular ideas. “The mainstream’s aversion to left-on-left debate has helped to convince many voters that keeping us out of power is their only defense against Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, Defunding the Police, Open Borders, and the rule of the pronoun police,” Frank writes. No wonder, then, that caricaturing Democrats as “Communists” has become Trump’s closing argument in the final weeks before this year’s elections.  

Frank is not opposed to the values that the left represents or the outcomes it wants to see in a fairer, more equitable world. Rather, his primary objection is strategic: that the left has failed to do the hard work necessary to build popular support for its ideas:  

Convinced, often correctly, that they were on the right side morally and also certain—usually incorrectly—that they enjoyed majority support, they skipped the step likeliest to bring fundamental social reform: presenting an aspirational list of reforms and then working to educate a skeptical public, accustomed to the status quo, of the benefits of change.  

Frank’s solution is not to dismantle the left but to rehabilitate it. As a starting point, Frank argues, the left should leave aside its fondness for denouncing mainstream Democrats reluctant to adopt its ideas. It should also stop disparaging populism’s adherents in ways more likely to repulse than to convert. “Denunciations of the moral defects of populism’s supporters, no matter how soul-satisfying, do much more to reinforce those supporters’ commitment to their cause than induce them to rethink it,” he writes.  

And instead of offering unrealistic proposals for radical change that frighten voters, Democrats need to offer ideas “that will enjoy strong political appeal, enhance moral values, and have very visible effects.” For instance, Frank writes, Democrats should propose raising taxes on people earning over $300,000 by exactly the amount needed to pay for reducing the age of Medicare eligibility to 60. He also argues for protecting the rights of vulnerable Americans through “shields” instead of “swords.” Protecting people from unfair discrimination, he argues, is politically easier than mandating equal treatment in ways that voters won’t accept:  

If liberalism’s defenders show that the economic goals of growth and equity can be mutually reinforcing; that fundamental improvements in the fabric of society can be implemented in a politically acceptable way; and that we can profit from exploiting populism’s weaknesses as they have exploited ours, we will be able to preserve our most important values. 

Rising firebrands on the left are likely to dismiss Frank’s book as just another cup of weak, incrementalist tea. And if social media followings were the only barometer of popular opinion, the appetite for dramatic change is voracious.  

Frank’s record, however, speaks for itself. Through decades of advocacy and public persuasion, Frank transformed the politics of equality and improved millions of lives. He showed that the long arc of history does indeed bend toward justice—so long as it’s not forced to break.

The post Barney Frank’s Last Harsh Warning to the Left appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It’s become settled wisdom that Donald Trump’s first term as president might have been much more disastrous for democracy had patriotic Americans, many of them either Republicans or non-partisan figures in government, the courts, or the military, restrained his excesses at key moments. The epitome of this defiance was his vice president’s refusal to reject the confirmation of Joe Biden’s election in 2020, despite pressure from Trump and the hooting mob he summoned to intimidate lawmakers engaged in what should have been a routine rubber-stamping of the results. But there were a host of similar if less dramatic refusals to bend laws and the Constitution to the turbulent president’s will, as Jacob Weisberg notes in the introduction to his study of the vastly diminished resistance that met Trump’s intensified excesses when he reentered the White House in 2025.

Certainly, Democrats fought Trump 2.0 tooth and nail from the get-go, with largely futile opposition in Congress and hundreds of lawsuits from state and local elected officials. Almost entirely missing in 2025, however, was internal resistance in the administration and the GOP. There was also much more complicity and capitulation in key business and civic power centers that had shown backbone the first time around. These are the developments that Weisberg examines in his new book: Profiles in Cowardice, which identifies men and women who might have put roadblocks in Trump’s path but didn’t.

The title, of course, is an allusion to then Senator John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning (if largely ghost-written) Profiles in Courage, celebrating eight fellow U.S. senators—from John Quincy Adams to Robert Taft—who took principled yet unpopular and costly stands during their careers. Weisberg, conversely, chooses eight ignoble enablers or bystanders who imperiled democracy in 2025.

His targets are diverse, and I’d bundle all but one of them into three groups. First, the hasty capitulators: Super-lawyer Brad Karp of the firm Paul Weiss and Dartmouth College President Sian Beilock did seem to lack fundamental courage when they immediately caved to White House extortion measures (thus exposing others to horrific pressure to do the same). Second, pure opportunists: Steven Schwartzman, the financier, and Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and chair and owner of Blue Origin and The Washington Post, snuggled up to Trump to secure business advantages and protection from reprisals. And third, ideologues, although they’re not always thought of that way: Mitch McConnell, George W. Bush, and John Roberts, whose conservative agendas overlap with Trump’s interests, chose to go along to get along despite their clear disdain for the tyrant. The final subject, right-wing flamethrower Megyn Kelly, feels misplaced in the book: Once the target of gruesome Trump insults, she genuinely seems to have gone pure MAGA after helping to bring down Roger Ailes but then bombing in mainstream media.

Weisberg is fluent and fair in telling the stories of these disappointing would-be resisters. His take on Bezos is particularly helpful to those who don’t know the saga of how Amazon became so incredibly powerful, or the extent to which this history-making business may be a sideshow cash-cow for the lifelong “Trekkie” whose heart belongs to space travel. Trump gained influence over the legendary Post—the newspaper that took down Richard Nixon and published the Pentagon Papers—via the White House’s leverage over Bezos’s space tech company Blue Origin. Its investments and operations are vastly dependent on federal contracts, and its proximity to the Post is one of those accidents of history from which the 47th president seems so often to benefit. The book also offers an efficient introduction to the dynamics of extortion, competitive pressures, and fears of adverse publicity that gave Trump such extraordinary power over national law firms and Ivy League universities, and why some institutions didn’t succumb. At the same time, Paul Weiss and Dartmouth did, mostly because Karp and Beilock raced to get out of harm’s way.

But the book’s intellectual and emotional center is Weisberg’s takes on Mitch McConnell and John Roberts. Unlike the other subjects of Profiles in Cowardice, Weisberg believes these two men could arguably have stopped Trump 2.0 in its tracks. Granted, many of the opportunities McConnell and Roberts had to do so preceded Trump’s return to office, and thus didn’t represent the cowardly acts of 2025 that this book supposedly examines.

In McConnell’s case, the truly pivotal moment Weisberg discusses is Trump’s second impeachment trial following the attempted January 6, 2021, coup that McConnell unambiguously condemned. Had the then Senate Majority Leader scheduled a trial before Trump left office on January 20, a conviction—and with it, a ban on any second Trump term—might have been possible. But the trial didn’t begin until February 9. According to McConnell, orchestrator of the scheduling gambit, Trump couldn’t then be impeached for the simple reason that he was out of office. In the end, McConnell voted for acquittal, saying his hands were tied and that criminal courts could handle any outstanding issues—not anticipating the Supreme Court’s sweeping immunity ruling on Trump’s behalf. Thus, says Weisberg, “the best opportunity to rid the country of Donald Trump once and for all [was] squandered.”

(It’s not at all clear there were ever going to be enough Republican votes to convict Trump, casting doubt on Weisberg’s insistence that the majority leader could have stopped Trump from ever returning to office, but McConnell’s ploy did rule it out entirely.)

McConnell’s cooperation with Trump’s first-term legislative agenda is easy to understand, since it coincided with the default conservative agenda of tax cuts and efforts to pare back the social safety net significantly. Perhaps more important to McConnell, however, was the opportunity to remake the federal judiciary in a conservative direction. By the time Trump’s second term began, McConnell was no longer majority leader, and was enfeebled by poor health. He was very much a bystander during Trump 2.0.

Roberts, meanwhile, gave his gift to Trump’s second-term power trip in July of 2024. Writing in the majority opinion in Trump v. United States, Roberts bestowed upon Trump the presidential immunity doctrine—in one fell swoop closing off the slim chance of a pre-election federal criminal conviction and providing the executive branch serene peace of mind about any future legal consequences.

Roberts’s record on major cases involving Trump before and after this decision has been mixed, but where he’s helped the administration, it’s mostly been to pursue longstanding conservative legal objectives. The Trump v. Casa decision banned the nationwide injunctions by district court judges that had put the brakes on Trump power grabs ranging from the decimation of civil service protections to mass deportation measures. Advocates of presidential prerogatives from both parties have pursued the results of the decision for years, and Roberts has been a steady advocate for expanding presidential power over federal agencies and national security matters since his service in the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations.

Of course, the chief justice’s variable record does show a willingness to displease Trump occasionally. A good example was this year’s decision rejecting the administration’s efforts to revoke birthright citizenship, with Roberts writing the majority opinion. The chain of Roberts decisions most cheered by MAGA Republicans—the gradual unwinding of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—reflects his longstanding pre-Trump grudge with remedial efforts to address past radical discrimination. Trump’s half-hearted efforts to hang onto Congress through his second term could owe quite a bit to the Court’s blessing of partisan gerrymanders, but that this White House benefits is a bit coincidental.

In the end, it’s doubtful that Roberts’s decision in Trump v. United States prevented the prosecution and conviction of the scofflaw president. Most of the chief justice’s other “favors” to Trump involved stands he would have probably taken had some other president been in office. Like McConnell, Roberts was more of a Trump fellow traveler than someone who understood the danger to democracy he posed and refused to get in his way out of fear or White House pressure.

Weisberg is correct, of course, in suggesting that McConnell and Roberts, both lifelong Republicans, found ways to avoid antagonizing Trump even when some harsh truth-telling was in order. He bluntly says of Roberts that he may have viewed Trump as “good news wrapped in a bad taste . . . The Chief Justice was getting the outcomes he wanted—an end to affirmative action, a unitary executive—and so he closed his eyes to everything else.” Unfortunately, that is probably true of most partisans with respect to presidents of their own party.

Perhaps the most controversial “coward” in these profiles of cowardice is Trump’s predecessor and punching bag, George W. Bush. Weisberg is exasperated that Bush, all but uniquely among modern presidents, has refused to criticize his successors (Obama as well as Trump) by name. However, he has signaled his disdain towards this particular successor in countless ways. Weisberg doesn’t assert that W. could have somehow blocked Trump’s ascension to the White House or his 2024 comeback. But he clearly believes that only cowardice, timidity, or fear of controversy can explain Bush’s tight lips. Here’s his most censorious judgment:

What would have happened if George W. Bush had said openly what he thought about Trump? The behavior of the Cheney family, so closely tied to the Bushes for a quarter century, provides a useful contrast. The difference between the Cheney family and the Bush family is that the Cheneys had genuine courage and were willing to pay the large price for standing up to Donald Trump.

That’s all very true. But it’s equally true that Dick and Liz Cheney’s defiance had approximately zero effect on Trump’s reconquest of power in 2024 or his abuse of that power in 2025, other than serving as examples of elite GOP hostility to the “populist” president. Trump’s MAGA warriors would have been thrilled by open enmity from the Bush family. So it’s not easy to condemn W. for just keeping his mouth shut.

In assessing courage and cowardice in the face of Trump’s return to power, Weisberg underestimates the culpability of another key actor in the drama that led to Trump 2.0: the primary and general electorate of 2024. When Trump announced his third presidential campaign, Republicans by no means rolled over, as I noted in New York on the eve of his November victory:

The semi-disgraced 45th president, his reputation freshly bruised by the midterm losses of his handpicked candidates, did not look inevitable: He drew 12 primary opponents, including a senator, two governors, a former vice-president, a former senator, and three former governors. One rival, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, was coming off a historic landslide reelection that excited Republicans everywhere…

Trump, who didn’t participate in a single debate, crushed his Republican rivals, disposing of DeSantis in Iowa and Nikki Haley—the final symbol of resistance—on Super Tuesday. They both subsequently endorsed him, reflecting the complete makeover of the GOP into Trump’s party and, just as importantly, the abandonment of any party misgivings about the former president’s conduct in office on January 6. 

In contrast to Trump’s win in 2016 and his claimed victory in 2020, he won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College vote in November 2024 (albeit not by the landslide margins he asserts). Many Trump voters knew he represented a threat to democracy and the rule of law, but cared more about gasoline prices or a handful of transgender athletes. Sometimes willful ignorance, selfishness, and pure malice matter more than cowardice in preventing resistance to great evils. Responsibility for the debacle of 2025 is a broadly shared burden.

The post Who Enabled Trump’s Second Act? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Ukrainian team visiting Oslo in late August came armed with a hefty research report—73 packed pages of open-source intelligence and policy proposals designed to help Norway prepare for a confrontation with Russia. The most likely scenario, the paper warned, would be more like the Battle of Britain than Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s 3.8 million-man World War II invasion of the Soviet Union. Moscow is unlikely to send tanks or troops to Norway, the report said. Russian strongman Vladimir Putin knows he can’t win a direct military clash with NATO. More likely would be a combined blitz of drone assaults, sabotage, and cyberattacks—what the paper compiled by the Kyiv-based Sahaidachnyi Security Center and paid for by the Ukrainian drone manufacturer Buntar Aerospace called the “Battle of Norway.” 

But even the hawkish Ukrainian team was unprepared for what hit Norway just days later on August 24. The day after Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre visited Kyiv, promising continued support and a fourth annual payment of $9.1 billion, a pro-Russia hacker group calling itself Server Killers startled the Nordic nation with a social media post. “We declare cyber war” on Norway, the message read—white letters against a fiery background featuring an image of the Kremlin and a Russian flag.  

Server Killers is an experienced hacking collective with documented Moscow connections and a long rap sheet—attacks in Britain, Canada, Denmark, Spain, and Romania. Over the next three days, it targeted Digdir, the agency overseeing Norway’s cutting-edge digitization of public services, bombarding its servers with so much spam that government websites stopped working for citizens. The “distributed denial of service attack” was the largest in Norway’s history—if not the start of the battle of Norway, certainly an alarming warning. 

Disruptive as it was for Norwegians, the Server Killer attack hardly made international news—Russia is now launching so many so-called “hybrid” or “gray-zone” assaults on Europe that it can be hard to keep track of them.  

According to the Sahaidachnyi Center, which maintains one of the best online resources monitoring what it calls the “Everywhere War,” there were nearly two dozen attacks attributed to Russia or pro-Russian groups in the last six weeks alone—and the center’s team says attributed attacks are just the tip of the iceberg.  

A cyberattack like the one in Norway shut down government websites in Sweden. Russian drones repeatedly violated Moldovan and Romanian airspace. The Polish Air Force intercepted a Russian spy plane. Arson attacks targeted factories making drone components in Poland and Slovakia. In two other suspected but not yet attributed acts of sabotage, improvised explosives damaged power cables in Germany—two similar and all-but simultaneous incidents more than 300 miles apart.  

The attempted attack at the Leipzig/Halle airport, a major NATO logistics hub in eastern Germany, was too brazen for the world to ignore. A drone packed with explosives flew toward a parked Ukrainian cargo plane. It bounced off its wing before landing just a few yards away—fortunately without exploding or igniting the contents of the aircraft’s fuel tank. Twenty minutes later, a second drone nearly hit a DHL cargo aircraft, forcing it to abort landing and divert to another airport. Ten days after that, a third drone packed with the same kind of explosives was found in a field not far from the Leipzig runway. It too had failed to detonate, but if even one of the three devices had exploded, the result could have been a deadly catastrophe.  

European leaders across the political spectrum reacted with outrage—clearly, a red line had been crossed. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte denounced what he called the “malign activities targeting our territory.” European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas warned that “attempts to intimidate Europe will fail.” A few weeks later, when the German government officially blamed Moscow for the incident, both NATO and the EU tweeted their support—a notable show of solidarity. 

Still, despite the tough talk, action has been limited. Germany closed the Russian consulate in Bonn and a Russian cultural center in Berlin. Authorities promised tighter controls on Russians seeking to travel to Germany and additional pressure on the shadow fleet that illegally transports Russian oil. But it was hard to see how any of this would give Putin much pause. Certainly, none of these measures are commensurate with what Moscow is doing, and no one has suggested punching back or taking the fight to the enemy. 

In fact, Europeans have been agonizing for years about how to fight back against Russian aggression. Already in the Cold War era, Soviet espionage far outmatched Western efforts. A secretive police state was much harder to penetrate than the West’s open democracies, and Soviet operatives faced far fewer ethical constraints. Also apparent early on, many Europeans were uneasy with what they saw as brash U.S. methods—paramilitary operations, covert action, and efforts to destabilize foreign governments. Then, in the decades after the Cold War, Europeans bet big on diplomatic engagement with the Kremlin, inviting Moscow into Western forums and structuring their economies around trade with Russia. 

All of this left Europe at a disadvantage when Russia attacked Ukraine in 2014 and began experimenting with what we now know as hybrid tactics. Fearful Western capitals hesitated to alienate Moscow or endanger trade. The downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in 2014—Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine used a Russian missile to crash the commercial airliner, killing all 298 passengers and crew—brought a burst of condemnation, but no fundamental shattering of trust. Even in 2022, when Russia again invaded Ukraine and resumed escalating in the gray zone, Europe was slow to see the hybrid threat and uncertain how to react. One scathing Ukrainian, who I won’t name, called it “deterring by ignoring.”  

Sahaidachnyi Senior Fellow Elena Davlikanova points to 2024 as a turning point in the everywhere war. By then, Moscow could see it would be a long slog in Ukraine. Russia had survived two years of Western sanctions and restructured its economy on a wartime footing. The Kremlin had also adapted to the West’s 2022 expulsion of the diplomats once responsible for the bulk of Russian espionage, establishing mechanisms to recruit a new generation of operatives—former criminals, alienated migrants, and other marginal, underemployed civilians.  

The upshot, according to one count by the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs: the number of gray-zone operations in Europe grew eightfold between 2022 and 2024, with the top categories being sabotage, vandalism, influence operations, and assassination. But even then, Europeans were unsure how to react, consumed by concerns about ethics and the rule of law. 

The debate has been unusually one-sided, with almost all voices favoring restraint and few, if any, arguing explicitly for a muscular, punitive response. Finnish researcher Minna Alander summed up the widely shared consensus behind this cautious approach: “We should never forget what we are protecting,” she wrote, “our free societies based on democracy and the rule of law.” No matter what Russia does, it’s clear to everyone that the West cannot hit back symmetrically—cannot set fire to a shopping mall or try to assassinate a CEO, as Moscow has done repeatedly in Europe in recent years.  

But that’s not the only reason for Europe’s timidity. Many leaders still hesitate to alienate Russia, or they fear escalation. It has proved maddeningly difficult to coordinate even a modest continent-wide response—capitals differ widely in their assessment of the Russian threat and how much effort Europe should expend to counter it. Attributing assaults to Moscow—tracing the link between the Kremlin and a petty criminal in Poland or Norway—is arduous and often impossible. Perhaps the biggest stumbling block is public opinion. No leader wants to frighten voters by revealing a threat they cannot counter, and it’s far from clear how many Europeans have an appetite for confronting Russia. 

The result, even as Moscow escalates, has been a carefully calibrated “asymmetric” response. Most European tactics, nationally and continent-wide, center on protecting the homeland rather than punishing the Kremlin. The EU approach rests on five pillars: intelligence sharing, protection of critical infrastructure, building societal resilience, public condemnation, and economic sanctions. NATO stresses coordination, protection, and prevention. The toolbox of choice for national leaders has been similarly heavy on defense and cautious, diplomatic steps: increased military spending, sanctions, and continued aid for Ukraine. 

Separately and together, these efforts have made some difference. Military aid for Ukraine has protected Europe from more concerted Russian aggression. NATO cooperation in patrolling the Baltic Sea appears to have discouraged underwater cable-cutting. Intelligence sharing is crucial, alerting countries to looming dangers they don’t see, and aligned public condemnation—all or most of the continent speaking with one voice—sends a signal to the Kremlin that its efforts to divide Europe aren’t working.  

But the Leipzig attack may finally be pushing Europe to go further, opening the door ever so slightly to thinking the unthinkable—how to take the fight to Russia.  

German media reports suggest Berlin is moving toward a more muscular approach. Among proposed changes, an expanded Federal Police anti-drone force will be authorized to protect airports, railway stations, and government offices by shooting down enemy drones. So, too, the private companies that operate most critical infrastructure in Germany—they will now be legally authorized to counter incoming unmanned systems. Other reports in the international press point to similar quiet reassessments at think tanks across the continent. 

But arguably the most far-reaching recommendation comes from Ukraine—and it’s more about political will than any particular tactics, lethal or nonlethal. “Acts of sabotage, disinformation, interference in electoral processes, espionage, attacks on critical infrastructure and industrial facilities . . . These are not isolated incidents,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote recently on social media. They are part of a “deliberate” Russian strategy that “must not go unpunished.”  

The first and all-important step for Europe, according to Sybiha: a new mindset. “The reality is that Russia considers itself at war with Europe,” he warned, “even if Europe does not consider itself at war with Russia.” 

Davlikanova of the Sahaidachnyi Center spells out the thinking behind his argument. “Hybrid attacks aren’t just about scaring countries that are helping Ukraine,” she explains. “Europeans tell themselves that the war in Ukraine is a fight between two distant countries with historical differences. What they don’t see is that Putin is gunning for them, too. He is determined to recreate the Cold War Soviet sphere of influence, reclaiming half of Europe—including a third of Berlin.” 

Recognizing that the continent is at war—not hybrid or gray-zone but actual, existential war—would have profound repercussions for Europe. Countries at war feel a sense of urgency. They’re much less hesitant about imposing costs on the enemy. They look for ways not just to protect but to punish and retaliate. This needn’t mean abandoning Western principles or the rule of law. Any allied response must be proportionate and legal, and the more capitals that come together to advance it, the better—if not NATO or the EU, then a coalition of the willing. 

Most experts agree the process starts with reconsidering the rules—treaties, laws, and administrative regulations—that currently tie Europe’s hands.  

Should NATO pilots on air policing missions have more leeway to engage the enemy? What about ground-based air defense crews? Surely, there’s room for more information warfare—not disinformation of the kind Moscow spreads but conveying the truth about world events to the Russian public. Many argue that the law should allow for confiscation of Russian assets, whether by nation-states or in Brussels. Finally, perhaps the most dramatic step being talked about, what about offensive cyberattacks against enemy military installations? 

But legal change is only a first step. What’s stopping Europe isn’t just restrictive law. Much of the public, particularly in southern Europe, still doesn’t grasp the nature of the Russian threat—doesn’t see how far Putin’s ambitions reach or what he’s willing to do to achieve them.  

How many hybrid incidents will it take to wake European voters? The Sahaidachnyi tracker counts 420 attributed attacks—from fighter-jet flyovers to assassination attempts—since February 2022. In the meantime, as Leipzig shows, if Europe can’t find a way to make the Kremlin pay a price, the assaults will only grow bolder. 

The post Europe Struggles to Respond to Russian Attacks  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

I confess to some smug satisfaction when a disciple of Donald Trump turns heretic—especially after some very public humiliation or as just desserts. 

Take, for instance, the recent case of the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. Once an avid and vociferous supporter of President Trump—and of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies in particular—Yiannopoulos was himself detained and deported by ICE for allegedly overstaying his visa. He now says he’s “ashamed” of his support for Trump. Yiannopoulos joins a long line of prominent defectors, including talk show demagogue Tucker Carlson, former ultra-MAGA Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, etc. 

These instances of apostasy have appeal for Trump opponents because they hint of a broader revolt among the MAGA rank and file. Few things are more maddening than the seemingly immovability of Trump’s base, even as Trump’s lawlessness grows more brazen and his behavior increasingly erratic (see, e.g., his unhinged string of “Truths” last weekend). 

As a new survey by Navigator Research reveals, “Trump regret” is real, and it’s propelled by disillusionment over the president’s failure to lower prices and avoid new wars, as promised during his campaign. But as this research also shows, this regret also has its limits. Democrats shouldn’t assume these Trump “regretters” will be leaping on the Democratic bandwagon. Many likely won’t. 

For this week’s interview (which you watch on our Substack here), I spoke with Navigator’s Director of Polling and Analytics, Tina Tang. Her research paints a nuanced portrait of Trump regretters and offers more than few surprises and cautions for Democrats seeking to reach this group. 

Let’s start with the good news: 

• The MAGA base is shrinking, and the Trump coalition is fracturing. 

Eighteen percent of 2024 Trump voters now regrets their vote, including nearly 1 in 10 MAGA Republicans. Trump is failing to hold the voters that swung toward him in 2024—younger voters, independents, and voters of color. 

One particularly interesting tidbit is that 22 percent of moms who voted for Trump now regret their vote—an indicator that the vaunted “MAGA-MAHA” alliance was also fleeting. 

• Trump regretters are angry about inflation and the war in Iran—which means Democrats‘ focus on “affordability” is on target.

Overwhelmingly, the survey found, Trump regretters feel that the president has broken his promises to bring down prices and keep the country out of wars. Tang says the word that kept recurring in her focus groups of these voters was “duped.” One voter, she said, told her that “they voted for no new wars and now Trump is starting wars both abroad and in America.”

Compared to voters overall, Navigator’s survey found that Trump regretters are especially sour on Trump’s performance on the economy and deeply pessimistic about their own finances. For instance, 77 percent of Trump regretters disapprove of Trump’s job on the economy, compared to 63 percent overall. Sixty-nine percent are “uneasy” about their personal financial situation, again compared to 63 percent overall. 

Now here are the cautions:

• Trump regretters are less concerned about ICE and other issues animating Democrats.

While many Democrats have focused on concerns like the cruelty and lawlessness of the administration’s immigration policies, Trump’s unconstitutional interference with elections, and threats to women’s reproductive health or the climate, these issues aren’t primary motivators for regretters, compared to the economy. In fact, Trump regretters are more likely to approve of Trump’s handling of immigration than voters overall (43 percent versus 41 percent). 

When asked about the most important issues they believed Congress should tackle, topics like “democracy” were at the bottom of the list for Trump regretters. Just 8 percent of these voters put “democracy” among their top five concerns for Congress, 5 percent named election integrity, and only 12 percent said climate change.

• Trump regretters don’t trust Democrats either. 

As other surveys have found, rejecting Trump is not the same as embracing Dems. Many Trump regretters are now politically homeless, with deep distrust of both parties on many key issues, including the economy. 

For instance, just 25 percent of Trump regretters trust Democrats as the party better equipped to handle inflation and the cost of living. That’s better than the 18 percent level of trust accruing to Republicans, but that also leaves a whopping 54 percent who said they don’t trust either party to bring down prices. Corruption is an issue with an even bigger trust gap, even as Democrats have begun to raise it as a potentially potent issue this fall. While 72 percent of Trump regretters do see Donald Trump as “bringing more corruption to Washington,” 65 percent don’t trust either party to clean things up. This means that even as Democrats throw stones at the GOP’s kleptocratic governance, Trump regretters mostly see the shattering of a giant glass house. 

The overall story, however, is a positive one for Democrats: A significant number of Trump voters are up for grabs. While their numbers are relatively small, elections have been close enough that their behavior can make the difference in key races and battleground states. The question now is whether Democrats can deliver a message and agenda that rekindles faith in a group that believes its trust has been shattered. 

Politics Editor Bill Scher argues all signs are pointing toward a Big Blue Wave this fall, despite Republicans’ mighty efforts to tilt the field in their favor and the dearth of quality polling. For one thing, it doesn’t hurt that Trump continues to commit unforced errors, like the midterm “Trumpalooza” this week that accomplished little but to “give free footage to Democratic admakers,” as Bill writes. Read his race-by-race analysis here. 

Don’t miss at the Monthly…

Beware media misreporting on the fight over mail-in ballots. Some media outlets have been reporting—wrongly—that the Trump administration has won the battle to restrict mail-in voting this fall. In truth, the fight is ongoing, and Trump is likely to lose, writes voting rights expert Josh Douglas. Yet misperceptions fed by the media may serve to suppress the vote and add to voter confusion, Josh warns. “Sensationalist headlines that fail to convey nuance can harm the public’s understanding of our democratic processes and ultimately undermine faith in our elections,” he writes. Read here. 

Say his name. When Charles Adair died in a Kansas City jail, the national media treated his death as that “of another Black man held down until he stopped breathing,” writes journalist Melinda Henneberger. But Adair’s death is much more than that, she writes, because it reflects the further tragedy of a criminal justice system ill-equipped to handle serious mental illness. Though Adair showed obvious signs of schizophrenia, “deputies at every turn treated Adair like he was being a recalcitrant jerk instead of someone experiencing a mental health crisis,” Melinda writes. The absence of reform will mean more victims like Adair. Read here. 

The lost journalistic world of 9/11. What brought Americans together on September 11, now a quarter century ago, was the shared experience of bearing witness to this tragedy. Those of us who were there to remember all saw the same footage, watched the same speeches, and read many of the same articles. Common understanding built common purpose and national unity. Now imagine if the horrific events of 9/11 were to happen in today’s media environment. Imagine social media feeds clogged with misinformation, conspiracy theories, fragments of video, and a deluge of hateful commentary. In this vintage piece—written five years ago but no less relevant today—Executive Editor Digital Matt Cooper recalls his experience covering 9/11 as a top editor in the Washington bureau of TIME and mourns the loss of the journalistic enterprise that made our collective experience of that day possible. Read here.

Plus…

• UnHerd columnist Ryan Zickgraf reviews gonzo journalist Jon Ronson’s latest book, which explores the outer rings of the manosphere. Among the stops in Ronson’s tour: a castle in Connecticut owned by an erstwhile reality-show prince intent on building a real-life harem. 
• Christian Caryl reviews Peter Bergen’s new book on the mistakes that led up to the tragedy of 9/11, the lessons we’ve failed to learn since then, and the danger these continuing missteps present to our future. “One can only imagine how long we, and the rest of the world, will end up paying for Trump’s and Hegseth’s blunders in the Middle East,” he writes. 
• Jonathan Alter also offers his remembrances of 9/11. 

Coda… 

In potentially another bad sign for the president, it appears the appetite for Trump-related merch might be diminishing. (What, no interest in an $85 Trump hoodie or a $180 pickleball paddle emblazoned with a “Trump crest”?) 

The Wall Street Journal reports that at TrumpTownUSA, reputedly the nation’s largest freestanding store dedicated to all things Trump, daily sales have fallen from a peak of $15,000 in 2024 to $1,500. Donald Taylor, the store’s 76-year-old owner, told the Journal that he attributes the slump “to customers’ struggles with higher gas prices due to the Iran war and persistent inflation.” The Journal further reports that other Trump-focused stores have closed for good. 

And the official online Trump Store might not be doing that much better. A July 1 post on X hawking a 25 percent off discount on America 250 gear got just 26 likes, four reposts, and five extremely hostile comments. (There have also been no new posts since July 4.) 

As always, thanks for reading. And please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. We at the Monthly count on readers like you to help build our community and spread the word. 

Have a great week! 

Anne Kim, Senior Editor

The post Will a Wave of “Trump Regret” Lift Democratic Boats This Fall? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On Wednesday night, I went to a screening in Montclair of my friend Steve McCarthy’s documentary, Finding Paddy. It’s a film Steve made more than 20 years ago about his friend Paddy Brown, in 2001 the most decorated firefighter in the FDNY, a hero with demons who died trying to rescue people burned in the North Tower. The film opens with several of the 80 haunting voicemail messages left on Paddy’s answering machine that day: Paddy, are you OK? Paddy, call me. Paddy, I’m so worried. Paddy!

The film thrust me back to that day, though I was already en route. On September 11, 2001, a spectacular cloudless fall day, I heard on my car radio that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. With the Lincoln Tunnel now closed, I got off a commuter bus and drove to Secaucus, where MSNBC (my part-time employer) then had its studios. I could see from Route 3: one tower up, the other down, enveloped in smoke. Moments later, the second one fell. I spent the rest of the day and all night at MSNBC, and between 1:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m., wrote a long piece for a special issue of Newsweek, contained in a collection, that began this way:

Summer is over in America. Fat and happy is history, a closed chapter in our national experience. By midday Tuesday, with the surreal horror sinking in, the sense spread widely that life in the United States would change as permanently as the skyline of New York City. But change how? Despite the unspeakable carnage, maybe we shouldn’t change so much after all.

On one level, we didn’t. At first, no one would even dare to laugh. We were told, “irony is dead.” That lasted only a couple of weeks or so. New York survived and prospered; the skyline was eventually repaired. But my fears of too much change were hardly misplaced.

At first, President Bush responded well, setting the right tone in speeches and by visiting a mosque. It helped. (After 9/11, there were about 500 anti-Muslim hate crimes, about a quarter the number of anti-Jewish hate crimes today.) I finagled my way into a press pool and was three feet from Bush on September 14 at Ground Zero — a hellscape from Dante’s Inferno — when he draped his arm around an ancient fireman from central casting and shouted through a bullhorn: “I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” It was inspiring. In his memoirs, Ari Fleischer, Bush’s press secretary, remembered that I whispered in his ear: “That’s your guy’s defining moment.” And it was.

Unfortunately, the “people who knocked those buildings down” — namely Osama bin Laden and his crew — didn’t hear from us. They escaped at Tora Bora. We later learned that by September 14, Bush’s advisers had already decided to use 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq. Talk about change. Bush inherited a balanced budget from Bill Clinton and a plan for confronting Al Qaeda that he ignored. Then we spent $8 trillion in a “War on Terror,” lost about 14,000 Americans (if contractors are included), with 53,000 wounded and thousands more dead from suicide after returning home from two forever wars. Today, agencies like ICE and the Joint Terrorism Task Force that expanded after 9/11 are being used by Donald Trump to hunt his domestic enemies.

We learned this week that we were lied to about the toxins at Ground Zero. I went there about a dozen times in the days and weeks after 9/11 and stupidly never wore a mask. In 2004, I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. My life was saved by a bone marrow transplant.

A year later, Joe Lhota, deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani, whom I got to know at Ground Zero, asked me to lunch. He told me he had lymphoma, too. (Fortunately, he survived as well.) Lhota said he thought we got it from toxins at Ground Zero. Maybe. Growing up, I spent summers in Beverly Shores, Indiana, where there’s a lymphoma cancer cluster because of groundwater contamination. Given my uncertainty, superstition, and lack of need, I never applied for any of the money that Jon Stewart helped generate.

I wrote several columns for Newsweek about 9/11. Some hold up well; others (including too-nice coverage of Giuliani) make me wince. I grew angry at some of the dopey commentary on the left — still audible — that the United States somehow “had it coming” from the terrorists, that this was “the chickens coming home to roost.”

This reminds me of the cruel anti-Zionists who on October 8 celebrated the murder of children, Holocaust survivors, and innocent concert-goers. It brought to mind the DSA types making excuses for (or even celebrating) Luigi Mangione, who murdered Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare. I still have a problem with Abdul El-Sayed saying “hurt people hurt people” to rationalize a Lebanese-American with ties to Hezbollah trying to ram a pickup truck full of explosives into Temple Israel, where 140 children were inside the facility’s early childhood center. El-Sayed recently backpedaled, saying it was “too soon” to provide such “context,” as if the problem with his comments was the timing. No, the “context” of killing innocent Americans is irrelevant.

Here’s the way I put it in 2001:

Obviously, some policies — like the United States stationing troops in Saudi Arabia — have contributed to Osama bin Laden’s rage. But there’s a big difference between understanding Islam and the history of the region, which we need much more of, and understanding evil, which is not just offensive but impossible.

Beyond the recriminations, I like to remember the small acts of grace. A few weeks after 9/11, survivors of the attack and still-grieving family members gathered for a memorial service near the steaming pit. Afterward, I saw them comforted by Old Testament symbols of mourning:

Through the wreckage, a visage in the dusk: a weary firefighter making a slow 100-yard trek from the rubble, his hands full of tower stones. A crowd gathered, as weeping family members took bits of the place where their loved ones had perished. They could also receive a city-issued urn of ashes, but this was more spontaneous and heartbreaking. Soon, an impromptu ritual began. The somber firefighters carried flowers from the survivors to a makeshift shrine in the distance, far beyond where it was safe to go, then returned with the precious stones.

The post The Tower Stones of 9/11 appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For a full decade after 9/11, Osama bin Laden was the most wanted man in the world. A few weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, in mid-December 2001, the al-Qaeda leader felt so endangered by a vengeful United States that he decided to dictate his will. In it, he took the extraordinary step of telling his children not to have anything to do with al-Qaeda,” the organization he had founded. “Bin Laden felt he’d failed,” journalist Peter Bergen tells us in his new book, All the Presidents’ Wars: Twenty-Five Years of America’s War on Terror.

Bin Laden’s American pursuers came within just a few hundred yards of snagging him at Tora Bora, where the U.S. Army fought one of the highest-altitude battles in its history—yet the general in charge, Tommy Franks, to his everlasting infamy, let al-Qaeda’s top men slip away across the border into Pakistan. In the years that followed, the U.S. built up a vast counterterrorism apparatus aimed, in part, at hunting down the man who had organized the largest foreign attack on the homeland in American history.

And what was bin Laden himself doing in the meantime? After his great escape he managed to settle down in the lush and remote Swat Valley, an area sometimes known as the “Switzerland of Pakistan.” It was there, Bergen tells us, that bin Laden and his young wife Amal got back to having sex: “Fugitives typically don’t have children while they are on the run, since they tend to slow you down, but bin Laden had four children with Amal while they were hiding in Pakistan after the 9/11 attacks.” Amal, who was Yemeni, pretended to be deaf to dodge uncomfortable questions from Pakistani officials. “Bin Laden must have believed,” Bergen wryly notes, “the US had no clue about where he was, so he could take the risk of enlarging his family.”

Bin Laden wasn’t entirely wrong. It would take the Americans a full decade after the 9/11 attacks to finally catch up with him. Even so, the man who was so often depicted by his enemies as an all-seeing terrorist mastermind comes across in this book as a bit of a dunderhead. “The attack on 9/11 was a great propaganda coup for al-Qaeda, but it produced the opposite strategic effect of what bin Laden had intended,” Bergen writes. “The United States became more involved in the Muslim world than at any time in its history, launching various kinds of military operations across the region, greatly damaging al-Qaeda and its affiliates.” Contrary to those who believe that bin Laden was artfully scheming to drag Washington into a Middle Eastern quagmire, he actually assumed that the U.S. was a decadent has-been in the throes of collapse—just like the splintering Soviet Union when it was chased out of Afghanistan in the 1980s. It was a view shaped by stories he’d heard from jihadi veterans about the humiliating American exit from Somalia after losing a handful of soldiers in the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993.

This wasn’t the al-Qaeda leader’s only miscalculation. By 2006, other holy warriors were abandoning him in droves, appalled by his acolytes’ attacks on fellow Muslims in Iraq. Bin Laden even felt compelled to issue a public apology, urging his followers in al-Qaeda’s notorious Iraqi branch, led by the psychopathic jihadi Abu Musab Zarqawi, to correct their “mistakes.” That pathetic effort to rein in his protege was emblematic. Even as bin Laden became increasingly irrelevant to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he was struggling to maintain his hold on the organization, issuing streams of memoranda from his final hideout in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad.

One is left with the impression that he managed to elude his pursuers through sheer good luck, the concealment offered by the huge population of a chaotic Pakistan, and the cluelessness of America’s leaders, who ended up diverting mind-boggling resources to the invasion of Iraq, a war of choice if there ever was one.

Bergen is unsparing in his critique of the twenty-first century’s greatest villain, but he is also quite skeptical—to varying degrees—about the four presidents who figure in the story. George W. Bush and his team have, of course, been widely vilified for launching the Iraq War under false pretenses. This was a cardinal sin that their successors have been cleaning up ever since—most prominently Barack Obama with his daring and ultimately vindicated decision to send the Navy SEALs into Pakistan to kill bin Laden in 2011. But Bergen has managed to add a useful bit of specificity to the indictment of Bush. The administration’s inability to head off the 9/11 attacks was not, as so often described, an “intelligence failure.” The CIA issued more than forty warnings to the president and his team in the first eight months of 2001, Bergen notes. There was also plenty of open source information indicating the likelihood of an Al-Qaeda attack on the United States; it was known that operatives connected to the group had contemplated using hijacked airliners as weapons. Bergen argues that the Bush administration later tried to prevent the 9/11 Commission from publishing its findings because it feared they would reveal the full scope of its negligence.

Yet Bush advisors like National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld —“unreconstructed Cold War warriors,” Bergen calls them—simply couldn’t comprehend how a non-state group like al-Qaeda could pose a major national security threat to the United States. Just days after 9/11, Rumsfeld chided a group of generals and officials at the Pentagon: “Don’t over-elevate the importance of Al Qaeda.” On a separate occasion, he observed that “[t]here just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan”—a comment with ominous implications. One country over-endowed with good targets was, of course, Iraq. The neocons in Bush Jr.’s orbit had long had Saddam Hussein in their sights, many of them believing that the president’s father had failed to finish the job during the Gulf War in 1991. The drive to topple Saddam was, to use Bergen’s elegant phrase, “untethered to any facts,” but that didn’t stop the Bushies from wanting to eliminate him anyway.

One of the leitmotifs of Bergen’s story is the seemingly perennial presidential disinterest in “the day after.” It turns out that toppling tyrants is far easier than preparing for life after their demise. The Bush team was famously unconcerned about all those pesky details of administering Iraq after Saddam’s removal; that failure to do the hard work of managing America’s conquest would result in a prolonged and expensive occupation. Obama, for his part, later said that one of his greatest regrets was allowing the destruction of Colonel Gaddafi’s regime in Libya without thinking through what might follow. Bergen is quite harsh on Biden, who, he argues, didn’t have to accept the unfavorable Afghanistan withdrawal deal with the Taliban, bequeathed to him by first-term Trump, and contributed to the chaos that ensued by publicly announcing a deadline for the U.S. pullout.

But all of this pales in comparison to the deeds of Donald Trump—the man who notoriously boasted in The Art of the Deal that “I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops.” Trump clearly gave little advance thought to the consequences of the war against Iran he launched on February 28; American military power would simply cow the Iranians into submission (shades of George W.’s “shock and awe”). That Tehran might actually fight back, leveraging its drones and missiles to strike sensitive blows at U.S. bases and allies throughout the region, doesn’t appear to have occurred to him—as if Ukraine hadn’t just spent the past four years giving a masterclass in how a smaller power might use precisely those tools to defy a much bigger one. That the Iranians could easily shut the Strait of Hormuz, striking a blow to global trade, was widely known in advance of the war. Bergen cites the case of Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, whose resignation two weeks into the war “dramatically undercut claims by Trump’s senior officials about the imminence of the threat posed by Iran,” since Kent’s position gave him access to high-level intelligence.

Did we learn anything at all from the Global War on Terror? Perhaps. Bergen suggests that it took us at least a decade and a half after 9/11 to properly understand how best to counter the jihadist threat. During the international fight against ISIS that began in 2014, both Obama and Trump saw in practice that the best policy was an approach summed up by the motto “Go Light, Go Long.” Relatively small numbers of U.S. advisers on the ground, working closely with Syrian and Iraqi allies and supported by American air power, proved more than a match for the fanatical fighters of the would-be Caliphate. It was also sustainable, both financially and militarily.

Even so, that’s little consolation for the colossal mistakes that have cost so many lives and so much treasure. Bergen’s withering portrait of stupidity and blindness at the highest levels of the U.S. government offers little consolation. One can only imagine how long we, and the rest of the world, will end up paying for Trump’s and Hegseth’s blunders in the Middle East. Bergen sums up twenty-five years of the war on terror in a fitting aside: “Incompetence,” he notes, “is generally a better explanation of most human activity than conspiracy.”

The post 25 Years After 9/11, What Have We Learned? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Editor’s Note: Five years ago, the Monthly published this piece, which remains timely today as political violence smolders and news media face continued financial challenges.

I was getting a late start, which wasn’t uncommon at newsmagazines early in the week. It was the turn of the century—and print was everything. The production of each glossy issue ran into the weekend. Work mounted on Friday and Saturday and eased at the beginning of each week. Some idiot flew into the tallest building on the East Coast, I thought, as I was getting dressed on a late-summer Tuesday. I left a phone message for the editor of Time, saying that we could dispatch our aviation correspondent to New York. I was the deputy bureau chief of the Washington bureau and in a way responsible for its—to use an ominous phrase—air traffic control.

Like everyone watching The Today Show, I was stunned when the second plane hit the South Tower. (By this time, news helicopters had moved into position to record the burning North Tower.) Despite more than two decades of magazine writing, I was denser than most viewers. It took me a couple of minutes to realize that the obliteration of a second plane, the decimation of the South Tower, with all the cameras fixed on Lower Manhattan, was not an accident but an attack, a crime scene and not a coincidence.

The following 48 hours were a blur of adrenalin and caffeine, anxiety and depression, monomaniacal focus and vacant stares. The staff of Time was galvanized, putting together one mammoth issue of the print magazine, published ahead of schedule on Thursday instead of the weekend, built mainly around one story. Written expertly by Nancy Gibbs, later to be the magazine’s editor, it was composed of hundreds of files—reporting dispatches, to the uninitiated—that she managed to synthesize into a piece that won the 2002 National Magazine Award for a single-topic issue. There was no headline on the cover, only a picture of the towers aflame. The traditional red border that had marked Time’s covers since the Henry Luce era was replaced by a mournful black. Sometimes mammoth newsweekly undertakings could be heavy-handed and eye-rolling. (A couple of years earlier, also in late summer, I’d stayed up all night in New York at Newsweek, where I’d been editing and writing for the rushed Princess Diana cover, which was exceptionally well done, although it bestowed a gravity on her death that now seems insanely overwrought.) Gibbs’s opus, though, worked. I’d always admired her opening lines: “If you want to humble an empire it makes sense to maim its cathedrals. They are symbols of its faith, and when they crumple and burn, it tells us we are not so powerful and we can’t be safe.”

Everyone who wasn’t a young child that day has a 9/11 story. Mine is less emotional than many. I wasn’t friends with anyone who died. My downtown D.C. was dappled with Pentagon smoke but no falling men, no cloud of ash, no paper debris. My life wasn’t in danger—although with Humvees on the streets of Georgetown, who could be entirely sure?

That day isn’t just a wound but a vantage point that offers some perspective on the present—this very different age of reporting, technology, and America’s place in the world.

In 2001, as now, there were people who hated the mainstream media. I do, too, from time to time—its banality, its focus on polls over policy, its both-sides-ism. (See Monthly alum James Fallows’s Breaking the News.) But when I hear the fake news slander from the former president or his minions, I twitch with rage. I remember how we labored on 9/11 to get things right amid a fog of war that was particularly thick. I know how hard I’ve worked on the many stories that, like 9/11, have overturned the world as we know it: on the financial crisis, the election of our first Black president, his bigoted successor, a pandemic that left everything frayed.

While conventional wisdom quickly focused on al-Qaeda as the perpetrator of 9/11, no one could really know at the time. The terror cult hadn’t claimed credit, and untangling the biographies of the foreign nationals on board the four doomed flights took time. Al-Qaeda had been linked in the 1990s and early 2000s to bombings of the USS Cole and the American embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. The World Trade Center itself had been bombed in 1993. But we were at pains not to write what we didn’t know. I spoke on background to the late diplomat Richard Holbrooke in the hours following the attack; I knew him professionally and a bit socially. (I relay his comments now because he’s passed away.) He offered a warning that al-Qaeda might not be responsible for the attack and pointed me toward a longtime intelligence hand with experience in Pakistan and the region, who played down the possibility that the mysterious Osama bin Laden might have masterminded this.

Holbrooke’s caveats were misplaced, as it turned out. But this is how reporting happens. You talk to everyone and try to make sense of it, coming up with the best shot at the truth that you can in the time you have. Criticism of journalism is fair. The charge that it’s fabricated is usually libel. (There are the fabulists who have made up stories, but news organizations are more on guard now than in the days, say, when I wrote the “White House Watch” column for The New Republic and Stephen Glass was an intern.) On 9/11, I don’t think I would have guessed that the charge of liberal bias—a mainstay of Republican critiques for decades—would morph into the Nazi Lugënpresse (lying press) slander of the Trump years.

September 11 sits in my mind like dots in a pointillist painting—getting my son out of preschool, crying when I saw the towers fall, elated when we could crack a few facts or hear from Jay Carney, one of our White House correspondents, who was part of the Air Force One pool that day. (He would later become White House press secretary under Barack Obama.) Few of us had cell phones, and those who did often couldn’t get them to work. Time’s resourceful office manager, Judith Stoler, had kept one dedicated hard line separate from the main system of desk phones, which also often failed. It became our lifeline to New York. Just as the CIA and the FBI hadn’t been talking to each other, a former Time colleague reminded me this week, it took time to get everyone to share information with ease: “I remember thinking not too long after but certainly not that day that we were as badly organized to cover it as the government had been to prevent it, that we were all in our silos, right?”

The day, of course, should offer lessons in caution as well as remembrance. If you’d told us that day that 9/11 would not usher in a wave of terror on American soil but would lead to a 20-year war in Asia that we would lose—a Vietnam for our millennium—it wouldn’t have been my first notion. In the weeks that followed, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security became a wise idea for all right-thinking people, left and right. Now it seems like an unwieldy conglomeration, combining the anti-counterfeit operations of the Secret Service with the often heavy hand of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, administering citizenship tests, policing cybersecurity, and even handing out generators after hurricanes. But then we still thought the AOL–Time Warner merger that had boosted our shares and options was also a brilliant idea.

September 11 always reminds me of the importance of where the camera is. There are no photos of United 93 crashing into the Pennsylvania dirt. The only pictures of the American Airlines plane hitting the Pentagon are from a security camera, and you rarely see them. Mobile phones with cameras weren’t ubiquitous then. If you look at photos of the stunned New Yorkers staring up at the burning towers, they aren’t holding phones; there’s no device putting distance between them and evil. George W. Bush soared in popularity after 9/11, but on the day of the attack, he was off-camera most of the time, being shuttled around the country. (Garrett Graff describes the president’s journey in incredible detail in The Only Plane in the Sky.) He had been reading to schoolchildren in Florida when the planes hit, and he chose to finish The Pet Goat even after being told of the strike. He then flew to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana to make a statement and spent the rest of the day under wraps at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, only returning to Washington that night to address the nation.

That left a video void, but also a void for a media and country that ached for leadership or heroism. (The NYC firefighters perished away from the cameras.) Most of the day, the most memorable public officials were Rudy Giuliani and Donald Rumsfeld, who seemed the epitome of bravery and leadership. Never mind that each would, to put it mildly, discredit themselves in the years that followed. Or that Giuliani’s courage walking the streets of New York was in part because he had nowhere to go—he had ordered the location of the city’s emergency command center at the World Trade Center, even after the 1993 attack on the complex, a decision that was widely criticized at the time. His idiocy thus became his fortune. Rumsfeld helped remove the injured from the Pentagon. The camera showed the bravura that marked his career as a Korean War pilot and, in the course of two terms, both the youngest and oldest defense secretary. The camera didn’t—couldn’t—show how invested he was in a war with Iraq, a folly that exceeds our efforts in Afghanistan.

If 9/11 had happened 20 years later, would the country believe the president and elevate him to 80, 90 percent approval ratings? No, we’re too divided for that, which may be a good thing, given Bush’s march to war. On the other hand, would “truthers” be a fringe element or the dominant voice on one of the partisan networks? Some news organizations, like Time, now owned by Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff (who by all accounts has done a wonderful job with the place), have the muscle to do what they did. But few other news outlets could summon it. Layoffs, which have provided story lines to fictional representations of newsrooms back to The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Broadcast News, have accelerated in the years since, devastating local media.

The dynamics of the web and social media—there was no Facebook and Twitter in 2001—and the economics of modern journalism put a premium on hot takes. Would a modern Time hold its fire for two days and put it all in one mammoth issue? Probably not. I joked with a former Time Washington colleague about how most major newspapers’ opinion voices would handle 2001—with a salvo of knee-jerk takes on what it all meant. Can you imagine enduring 9/11 and then Tucker Carlson?

We at Time had the money, muscle, and restraint in 2001 to write one long history of 9/11 in a day and a half, maybe less. It’s not that there were better journalists in 2001 than today. It’s that the economics generally favored better journalism, and the country, yet to be divided by news feeds and Twitter streams, was better able to listen.

I spoke with Nancy Gibbs this week. She’s now the director of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Wise then and now, she noted that the great files she received would have all been tweeted in real time. There was and would remain a need for a narrative that made sense of the attacks, she said, but today’s readers would have already had shards of information flying at them before we’d put together a stained-glass window.

She lamented that “our attention spans have been rewired since then,” although she noted, rightly, the importance of the big general interest narrative even in an age of polarization. But her optimism has waned. “Before the last year, when I would teach about polarization, I was operating, I think, on the assumption that the only thing that could bring us together again would be another 9/11 kind of attack,” Gibbs said. “And then we get attacked, not even by a foreign adversary, but by a respiratory virus. And we find a way to divide around that. I’ve lost a lot of my optimism, because there’s so much profit in division.”

She’s right. The terrorists maimed our cathedrals, as she wrote in Time. But two decades later, we’ve done a pretty good job of defacing our institutions all by ourselves.

The post The Lost Journalistic World of 9/11 appeared first on Washington Monthly.