Jon Ossoff Just Delivered Maybe the Greatest Debate Zinger in Ages

Barbarism surrounds us. ICE thugs have once again shot a man, firing at least five shots while he was in his car with his five-year-old son in New York City. Our incompetent and offensive “secretary of war” announces that the United States of America is going to livestream the execution by firing squad of a mass killer. Public executions are against international law. Amnesty International reports that in 2025, there were 17 public executions in the world. Eleven were in Iran, and six in Afghanistan. Great.

At least America is now fully starting to recognize what a moral cesspool Donald Trump and his cronies have made of this country. A new poll out from Pew has Trump’s approval at 30 percent and his disapproval at a stunning 68 percent. Can he get into the 20s before November 3? It sure seems that way. Does he really think, as The Atlantic reported this week, that bombing Iran before the election will help his numbers? He’s really so delusional as to believe that escalating a deeply unpopular war would lead to people rallying around the flag?

Against all this, most Democratic elected officials still haven’t found the right words to encapsulate all this corruption and rot. One Democrat, though, continues to stand out above all the others. If you haven’t yet seen some of the clips of Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff’s evisceration of his GOP challenger in last night’s debate, you need to watch them. The guy is a virtuoso—Bernstein with a baton, Jordan with a basketball.

The imperishable line that will be remembered, I think, for a long, long time, came when Ossoff said of Representative Mike Collins and his white supremacist and far-far-right ties: “It’s not just that you’ve hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office,” but you’re supporting policies that are “robbing your constituents to pay your donors.” Then came another killer, which is also so good that it would be the takeaway line for most debaters: “If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.”

That’s how you do it, folks. And make no mistake: It took some guts for Ossoff to decide to make his central attack on Collins his racism. There’s no guarantee, even in 2026, that a liberal Jewish Democrat could make that stick against a Republican in the state of Georgia. But Ossoff has pressed the point of Collins’s bigotry relentlessly. This is not someone who consulted polls and focus groups and listened to consultants telling him to keep the focus on Collins’s position on prescription drug prices. This is someone who asked himself, What is my opponent’s core moral flaw? and who went right at it with both barrels.

He’s almost certainly going to win, and possibly by a lot. And in doing so, in making his opponent’s bigotry his central line of attack, he’s doing something too many Democrats are gun-shy about doing these days: He took aim right at the heart of MAGA-ism, and he’s doing it without qualification or equivocation. And that’s why so many Democrats are so impressed by him.

As I wrote of Ossoff back in August, after his delicious barb about “Natalie” (Harp, the Trumpy amanuensis): “He understands that in today’s media environment, you have to create conflict to generate attention and buzz, and you have to do it in a way that stands a chance of going viral.” He did that last night, but he also did even more. Saying “half the Third Reich” is, among other things, really funny. It’s wildly hyperbolic, of course, but that too is the point.

It’s the kind of rhetoric the right has been using against Democrats for many years now. Back in 2004, I recall the right-wing Club for Growth launching a broadside against Howard Dean saying that he should “take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times–reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.” No Democrat would ever have said then that George W. Bush should “take his tax-cutting, government-hating, beer-swilling, brisket-eating, pickup truck–driving, Branson-loving right-wing freak show back to Texas where it belongs” anymore than any Democratic president would have suggested—twice in one week—that maybe Iran should bomb Birmingham or Tulsa.

That just wouldn’t work in reverse, for reasons having to do with which Americans the media deems to be “real.” But what does work, when Trump’s at 30 percent in the polls and more than half the nation is disgusted with him, is doing what Ossoff is doing: making moral cases against Republicans’ very obvious and offensive moral failings.

He says he has no interest in running for president. Who knows. And of course if he does run, we’ll have to take stock of his positions on a busload of issues. But liberals can be too focused on positions, and on candidates, especially presidential candidates, passing a range of litmus tests. Ossoff is from Georgia, not Massachusetts, so he has to be careful about some stuff. He may not check some boxes. But his rhetoric suggests that there’s a potential unchained Ossoff somewhere in there just waiting to burst out, an Ossoff who might be willing to take more aggressive positions while seeking national office. For now, while he’s not the front-runner in the 2028 polls or the betting markets, he is for my money the person most likely to catch fire and be satisfactory to enough progressives and enough moderates to bring the party together after what will probably be another fractious primary.

In the meantime, let’s just appreciate what he did last night. Democrats, we need more of that.

We’ve all had our laughs now at Eric Schmitt. I plan on continuing to laugh at him for quite some time. That was the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen a United States senator do. But it was also two other things besides embarrassing.

First, it was deeply revealing—of the Missouri senator’s crazed conspiratorial mindset, and of his presumptions about the world. What convinced him in the first place that former special counsel Jack Smith was in cahoots with Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis? I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Perhaps it came from some dark fascist corner of the interwebs that you and I don’t even know about, and from there to X to Fox News and so on. Basically the same way people came to believe Haitians eat dogs.

It was also amusingly revealing of Schmitt’s (and his staff’s, and let’s face it, modern conservatism’s) cultural prejudices. They checked the NBA schedule and the men’s college basketball game roster and saw just one game with a 7:30 p.m. start time—Warriors vs. Hawks in Atlanta—and thought, “A-ha, we’ve got our man.” But it seems never to have occurred to them to check the women’s college schedule. After all, what kind of man wants to go watch girls bounce balls around? A deep-state Hillary lover, that’s who! They’re probably kicking themselves for not thinking of it!

But the second thing Schmitt’s own goal was, besides embarrassing, was ominous. Because it showed how deep down this absurd rabbit hole the Republicans have gone—and the depths to which they’ll descend to try to find something on Smith. This perfervid posturing was on display Tuesday not only from Schmitt, but from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, who you could tell thought he was about to lower the boom on Smith about something having to do with his clandestine relationship with former CIA chief John Brennan. When a confused Smith said he’d never met Brennan, Grassley went all Emily Litella (there’s an old reference for you!) and ended his questioning under the kind of abrupt and petulant silence one might associate with a six-year-old being bluntly informed that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

But make no mistake: MAGA is still out to nail Smith. You’d think after a humiliation as comprehensive as Tuesday’s, they’d drop it. But you know these people. They don’t drop stuff. Case in point: Schmitt has repeatedly defended his catastrophic failure, claiming he regrets nothing while continuing to insist that Smith is a liar. A fiasco like that just makes them more convinced that the ruthless deep state is out to crush them, and their only recourse is to crush the nefarious foe to dust.

What might this mean, in practice? Well, for the nonce, it has manifested itself in a lawsuit—filed the day after the hearing debacle—by Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, alleging that Smith’s probe violated the Constitution’s speech and debate clause, which protects members of Congress from criminal or civil prosecution for activities they’ve undertaken in the legislative sphere. Prosecuting the case for Blackburn, who’s leaving the Senate and running for governor, is an outfit called the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a kind of right-wing version of the ACLU, conjured to life in 2017 with backing from groups affiliated with the Koch brothers and Leonard Leo (it made its bones fighting Covid-era mask and vaccine mandates).

The suit argues that when Smith, while probing the January 6 insurrection, subpoenaed phone companies for some GOP lawmakers’ call logs (but not the content of the calls), he was in violation of that clause. It’s an argument Republicans have been making for a while, and it’s nonsense. The speech and debate clause is a protection against being arrested and prosecuted for legislative activity.

Smith wasn’t looking for people to arrest; he was looking for witnesses to a coup d’état (like Senator Darline Graham’s late brother, Lindsey, as Smith explained to her Tuesday in yet another planned gotcha moment that flopped). In any case, the clause has generally been understood to protect only legislative activity. Admittedly, the law here isn’t settled, and these days you never know when a case like this might land in the lap of some Federalist Society servant. But there’s a reason federal judges have been in the habit of tossing MAGA suits like this.

Smith’s pursuit of these call logs is the basis of the claim by some House members, notably Jim Jordan, that Smith perjured himself before the House last January. It’s a little complicated, but: At two hearings last December, House Republicans asked Smith: “Did the toll records that you requested from the senators, did they include the content of the phone calls?” Smith replied no. It was truthful as far as it went, but it wasn’t quite the whole story because Smith and his team did see the contents of some congressional text messages from 44 legislators—but it wasn’t as a result of records requested from the senators. It was as a result of a separate subpoena, to the National Archives and Records Administration. Republicans never asked about that subpoena.

Like every good lawyer, Smith learned in law school: Answer the question you were asked, and only the question you were asked. Jordan contends that Smith was engaging in half-truths, and so he issued a criminal referral against Smith to the Justice Department in July. Jamie Raskin counters that “wishing that you had asked different questions while you had the opportunity to examine a witness is not a proper basis for a referral of a witness for criminal prosecution.” Smith’s lawyers said at the time that “the questions and answers preceding and following these exchanges also make clear that the focus of the question was on the toll records subpoenas. Notably, the referral letter does not contest the truthfulness of Mr. Smith’s answers.”

Raskin said that if the referral were ever brought before a judge, it would “get laughed out of court.” That it probably will—although again, it depends on whose court it lands in. But in between here and there, Republicans can make Smith’s life very difficult indeed. The week before Jordan issued his referral, Attorney General Todd Blanche sat before the same Senate Judiciary Committee that became America’s laughingstock this week for his confirmation hearing. Missouri (really, Missouri again?) Senator Josh Hawley, surveying Smith’s supposed transgressions, asked Blanche if he had “thought about investigating this guy for perjury?” Blanche’s answer: “We take testimony in front of this body very seriously. Yes.”

In sum: We should all be steeling ourselves for the day that Blanche files an indictment against Smith. It would be another textbook example of Republicans doing exactly what they accuse the liberal deep state of doing: using the machinery of the government to engage in political witch hunts. There’s no actual evidence that Smith was engaged in any kind of witch hunt. Republicans say his investigations were unprecedented. Well, yes, they were—but that’s because we’ve never had a president who orchestrated a coup against the United States and who carted away boxfuls of classified documents and spent months ignoring polite requests from the FBI to come down to Florida and have a look.

Any prosecution of Smith should go about as far as Trump’s other failed revenge cases. But make no mistake: It could be assigned to an Aileen Cannon–type judge. And MAGA could claim a scalp and persuade uninformed Americans that there is no such thing as a rule of law, that there is only power, which is their point.

And finally, let’s end by returning to Schmitt. He’s not an idiot. There’s a standard joke about Trump that it’s a good thing he’s so dumb because if he were a smart fascist, he’d be a lot more dangerous. Well, Schmitt, Tuesday aside, is not dumb. He knew exactly what he was saying, for example, when he gave a speech about a year ago to the National Conservatism Conference that was for all intents and purposes a fascist interpretation of American history.

It’s a clever speech—there is no single incendiary line that can be quoted to outrageous effect. But in its entirety, it’s an ode to a national mythos rooted in blood and soil (he’s smart enough not to say those words) and an explicit rejection of the notion that America is in any sense an idea. Here’s a good contemporaneous analysis by Bridgette Dunlap of the Missouri Independent.

That’s who Schmitt actually is. And crazy ambitious. Tuesday morning—the day of Smith’s testimony—Axios ran with a “scoop” that Schmitt had “grown close to Vice President Vance and is seen as a top prospect” to be Vance’s running mate in 2028. That was almost surely teed up by Schmitt’s staff in anticipation of the nuclear bomb he was going to explode in his Javert’s lap that afternoon. That it blew up in his face because he believes in nutso conspiracies and forgot that women play basketball is a form of cosmic justice. But it doesn’t mean the MAGA version of the deep state is done with Jack Smith.

It was far from the most important development of the week, but the “deal” the Trump administration struck with Denmark over Greenland was just oh-so-perfectly-emblematic of virtually everything Donald Trump does. He and his people of course touted it as a great triumph that only Trump could have achieved, when in fact it was basically a reiteration, with a few small changes, of the agreement that’s been in place since 1951. For example, one change is that any non-NATO military presence is now explicitly barred. But it’s not like Russia or China was rushing to get a base on the island anyway.

Funnier still is the way the thing was hammered out. The New York Times reported that the deal “explicitly stops short of conveying any territory to the United States. And no one—especially Denmark, which governs the vast but mostly empty space—wanted to emphasize that point, for fear that Mr. Trump might renounce the agreement he had just hailed as ‘tremendous for Europe and for the United States.’” Why yes, dear Emperor, you have the most magnificent clothes!

It would be a huge embarrassment for any other president, except that Trump did so many more other embarrassing and vile things this week that Greenland doesn’t even rank. The White House press ban. The appalling welcome to Xi Jinping, where Chinese state media got more access than some U.S. media (speaking of press freedom, China ranks 178th out of 180 countries, while Trump’s United States is now sixty-fourth). The invitation to Vladimir Putin to the G20 summit, to be held in December outside Miami (well, specifically, and inevitably, at Trump’s golf resort).

But for all that, it was a positive week in that we finally began to see cracks in the MAGA foundation. A couple Senate candidates said the war in Iran has to be brought to an “immediate” end. Mississippi GOP Senator Roger Wicker denounced the pomp surrounding the Xi visit.

And most encouragingly, the word bloodbath began to appear in articles about the midterms, but there’s nothing Trump or Congress can do to turn the economy around dramatically in seven weeks, as mortgage rates top 7 percent and are expected to rise even more. But remember—it’s a small price to pay for preventing Iran from having the nuclear capability it never had until Trump tore up the Obama deal.

Let’s focus on that word, bloodbath. Yes, a lot of these Senate races are stubbornly close. But each passing week brings news of the experts shifting Senate and especially House races from “likely R” to “lean R” and from “lean R” to “toss-up.” A bloodbath may or may not happen, but one is surely gathering strength out there. And most Republicans are preparing for it in the way that politicians normally do—throwing whatever Hail Marys they can to try to save their hides but preparing themselves psychologically for a thrashing.

Trump doesn’t do that. Roy Cohn didn’t teach his protégé about the most dignified way to throw in the towel. He taught him that when you can see you’re going to lose, you search for new and more creative and abominable ways to cheat.

And so we have this rather alarming report from The Atlantic this week that an old friend of Trump’s is urging him to declare martial law “on or around” Election Day. Peter Ticktin went to military school with Trump and apparently has his ear. He persuaded Trump to pardon Tina Peters, the MAGA county clerk in Colorado who tried to prove nonexistent voter fraud in 2020. Radio host Wayne Allyn Root is another named in the article who has pushed Trump to declare a “national-security emergency” around Election Day.

These people are mad as hatters, but the problem is that the president of the United States is too, and he listens to them. Another problem is whether there’s anyone else telling Trump the opposite. The Atlantic article suggests that there are; that the more wizened political professionals around Trump are prepared to advise against things like sending troops to polling places and issuing declarations of martial law.

Comforting if true. But I wonder if, when the moment of truth comes, chief of staff Susie Wiles or any of the other supposed normies around Trump will make a forceful, concerted effort to prevent him from taking whatever extreme measure he wants to take. If Trump wants to find a way to invalidate the election, well, that isn’t Wiles’s bailiwick. It’s a Justice Department thing. So Todd Blanche is going to stop Trump from invoking the Insurrection Act?

Democrats and liberal groups are preparing for all this, to the extent they can. Marc Elias’s law firm filed an important suit this week with major Democratic campaign committees to block the Trump administration from sending armed guards from the FBI and ICE to the polls on Election Day. Why do they need to do this? Because Trump and his top officials have hinted or said repeatedly that they’d do it.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin confirmed that he had the authority to place officers at polling places. Border czar Tom Homan has said: “I mean, bottom line is, what are they afraid of? They say illegal aliens don’t vote.… But if only U.S. citizens can vote, I don’t see the issue.” FBI chief Kash Patel said, “If there’s a reason to go [to a polling place] because there’s been a violation of the law, we will.” And Blanche said at the Conservative Political Action Conference: “Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places? Illegals can’t vote.”

In addition, as the Elias lawsuit explains, in June, the Justice Department quietly removed from its website a long-standing manual about prosecuting election crimes. The manual noted that federal law prohibits dispatching “any” officer to “any polling place in any election.” Now that language has been scrubbed.

Donald Trump is an ignoramus, but he does know two things. One, he knows that if the Democrats take Congress, he’s in for an extremely difficult two years—or worse. With subpoena power, Democrats could launch investigations that could eventually make their way into federal courtrooms and dog him for the rest of his iron-slicing, well-done-steak-eating life.

Two, he knows how to cheat and steal—and that cheating and stealing, done brazenly enough, usually work. That’s where he’s going to be concentrating his efforts between now and November 3. And if all that fails, we can be sure that Peter Ticktin will be standing at the ready with advice.

It was a surreal week, bursting with surreal news generated by the surreal idiot who sits in the White House, but maybe the most surreal headline of all was the one I saw Thursday morning telling me that Costco was rationing motor oil. The limit they’ve set is very likely more than your average motorist needs, but still. Rationing! Am I in England in the 1950s? And on top of that, the price has nearly doubled since April, to $58 for a 10-quart pack.

Or maybe it was the news that diesel had topped $6 a gallon. Before the war in Iran, it was about $3.60 a gallon. Some stations, in fact, are out of diesel. That’s right, on the signs that normally list the price per gallon of diesel fuel, it just says “Out.” Diesel powers trucks and delivery vans and tractors and other farm equipment. (Harvest season is around the corner, by the way.) Also freight trains. And buses and ships and barges and tugboats. And bulldozers and backhoes and cranes, and I guess that also means forklifts—you know, the kind seen this week crashing repeatedly into the Kennedy Center. The nation’s, and the world’s, commerce, in other words, runs on diesel.

For years, we’ve wondered whether American democracy would survive Donald Trump. We still do, of course, and by the way, if you haven’t read Judge Michael Luttig’s terrifying piece on that subject that we posted last week, do so immediately (well, after you finish this). But now, we need to fret that capitalism may not survive Trump, and that between now and January 2029, assuming the GOP doesn’t go Twenty-Fifth Amendment on him, he’ll single-handedly bring not only the American but the global economy to its knees.

America is finally coming to terms with just what an ignoramus Trump is. In his first term, he inherited a steady economy with a record 75 consecutive months of job growth. Until the pandemic hit, he didn’t do anything to screw it up. He inflicted horror after horror on the nation in other realms, but until March 2020, his economy was fine to good.

But that was a different Trump. That was the “leashed” Trump—the Trump who still had a few grown-ups in the room who were willing to save him from his worst impulses. In term two, we have the unleashed Trump, surrounded by people who say only “yes” and tell him how brilliant he is. They validate every major decision he makes, and every major decision the unleashed Trump has made has been calamitous.

The first-term tariffs, mediated through more cautious figures like then–Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin (who made his real feelings about tariffs known in early 2025), were comparatively modest. They didn’t do the economy any good, but they also didn’t do much long-term harm.

But these tariffs, these unleashed ones—they’re a disaster. Wall Street hates them, Main Street hates them, farmers hate them, consumers hate them, China hates them, Canada hates them, the markets and bond traders hate them, everybody hates them. Even the normally toadyish Supreme Court said it hated them. A new poll from the Cato Institute confirms all this.

Trump’s other major decision, of course, was the war in Iran, which has been a top-to-bottom disaster. The Strait of Hormuz, no matter what he says, is effectively closed. On Monday, four commodity ships passed through the strait, compared to the prewar normal of 120, 130. And now of course, on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, Iran has the Houthis seizing Saudi pipelines and facilities. Saudi Crown Prince MBS asked Trump for help. He said no. Twice.

And that’s why diesel prices are headed toward $7 a gallon. They’re already $8.35 in California. As California accounts for nearly 15 percent of the U.S. economy, that’s a pretty big deal. So much of our produce comes from California. Produce prices were already rising over the summer—after all, growing produce requires fertilizer, and getting it to us requires diesel gas to power those refrigerated trucks. A bag of baby spinach or mixed greens runs what, $2.99? Picture that at $4.29 in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Finally, there’s just the general chaos that Trump creates on a daily basis. Every day, he enrages one world leader or another. Every day, he says or does something that makes the global situation more tenuous, and that weakens the United States. And has he met his match in Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney or what? One thing he did not expect was a leader of a soft little icy appendage he viewed as the fifty-first state being smarter and savvier and far more respected around the world than he is.

If a human being with normal cognitive development was presiding over this mess, we could reasonably hope that he’d recognize what has gone wrong and change. But Trump is not a normally developed human being. In an interview with Chris Hayes Thursday night, Maggie Haberman, who knows Trump’s congealed brain as well as anyone, said that she estimates he spends 70 percent of his time on the matter of his monuments—the arch, the ballroom, the aforementioned Kennedy Center. When he does bother to turn his attention to the economy, he says that it’s the best in the history of the country and that gas prices will come down rapidly as soon as X thing happens, which never happens.

In other words, given normalcy, we could hope that a president would huddle with his advisers and ask, What can we do to get out of this mess? Such a president would change course. But changing course requires two things. First, experimentation with ideas that don’t fit comfortably within his preconceived worldview. Second, admission that he might have been wrong about something. Obviously, Trump is capable of neither of those things.

The head of the Postal Service announced Thursday that work has stopped on developing systems to support Trump’s attack on mail-in voting. Looks like we’ve dodged that bullet. There will be more to come, perhaps culminating in the Luttig scenario. Or perhaps culminating in some elaborate attempt to steal the 2028 election. This will never stop.

So far, though, the guardrails of democracy have more or less held. But what about the guardrails of the economic system? They are: a Congress that conducts real oversight and demands accountability; a class of corporate and financial leaders who actually put the good of the country ahead of the next tax cut or earnings statement; a well-regulated market system that is set up to punish short-term excess and wealth creation for the few and reward efforts to produce shared prosperity. Right now, we have none of those things.

Democracy just might survive Trump. But it’s looking more and more like capitalism might not. It wouldn’t be the first time the system was brought to the brink of ruin by men who claim to worship it (see 1929). When will we ever learn?

We have trained ourselves to think of Donald Trump as sui generis, an outlier in the history of the American political experience. And of course, in so many ghastly ways, he is. But he arose from somewhere; the instant and fervent attachment of millions of conservatives to his brand of search-and-destroy politics, his disregard for the truth, did not emerge from whole cloth in 2015. It had antecedents. Some thing or things inculcated in the conservative mind a fealty to that brand of relentless political warfare.

And so, on this twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, older people need to be reminded of—and younger readers told for perhaps the first time—how the Republican Party of that era used that tragedy to impose its worldview on a confused and malleable populace and to browbeat the political opposition (and how, tragically, said opposition largely complied in ways that resonate loudly today). Superficial reminiscences published this week will bemoan the “fact” that we were a country united then, and look how far we’ve fallen. It sounds soothing. But nothing could be further from the more forensically examined truth.

The nation was united in shock and grief, that much is true. A different presidential administration might have approached that reality with a certain humility; an acknowledgment—especially given the dubious terms under which it took power (the Supreme Court made George W. Bush president, not the voters, who preferred Al Gore)—that its job was to give oxygen to that shock and grief in a sincere and nonideological way. To guide a tremulous nation through a gut-churning moment without hitching the trauma to a preconceived political agenda.

Bush did just enough of that to appear to your average person to be sincere about it. He visited a mosque in Washington just six days after the attacks and said, “Islam is peace.” That, to be sure, was laudable. Could you picture Trump doing that?

But behind the scenes, other, darker wheels were spinning, almost from the moment of the attack. Donald Rumsfeld was Bush’s secretary of defense. The very afternoon of the attack, he told an aide, according to declassified, handwritten notes: “Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time—not only U.B.L,” referring to the man then known in intelligence circles as “Usama” bin Laden and widely and correctly assumed to have orchestrated the attacks. And: “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” And not?

Hussein, at the time, was the leader of Iraq—and of what was without question a fascist, evil regime. American neoconservatives, a cohort that included Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney, and many others in the administration—had trained their bellicose eyes on Hussein since 1991, when the first President Bush repelled his invasion of Kuwait but spurned the neocons’ importunings to press on into Baghdad and depose Saddam. An organization, the Project for a New American Century, or PNAC, was conjured into existence during the Clinton presidency for the express purpose of keeping the pressure on U.S. administrations to wage war on Iraq. Cheney was a key figure in PNAC, a founding member in fact. He had been Bush Sr.’s defense secretary and had scorned his boss’s decision not to march on to Baghdad.

In other words: The great, unifying national tragedy was—within hours—converted into an excuse to wage a highly divisive and very ideological war, which was commenced in due course 18 months later. Those 18 months were defined by a campaign of lies about Saddam being six months away from being able to launch a nuclear weapon at the United States and having links to the 9/11 attackers. You see, Cheney, as Pentagon chief under Bush I, had developed with aides, including Wolfowitz, a plan—massively controversial at the time, when The New York Times revealed its existence in 1992—for U.S. global hegemony. At the heart of the plan was invading Iraq and turning it into a democracy.

So, to sum up: Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al. had wanted to invade Iraq since 1991. The 9/11 attacks gave them an excuse because they put the public in a jittery, revenge-seeking frame of mind. But public opinion was still skeptical, so from there, they started lying.

It worked, and they got their war. That it proved to be a disaster was no surprise. That’s what generally happens with wars when the people who start them think they’ll be cakewalks, over in weeks. I trust that sounds familiar.

On the domestic front, the uses to which the Bush team put 9/11 were possibly even worse. The surveillance powers of the federal government were expanded vastly and immediately. Those who raised questions about all this were attacked and maligned—not just for disagreeing with Bush, but for being enemies of America (“Why do you hate freedom?” became what we now call a meme in those pre-Twitter days).

Bush said in a speech a week or so after the attack that the terrorists came after us because they “hate our freedoms.” It was irresponsible nonsense. Al Qaeda did not attack the United States because we have a Bill of Rights. It attacked the United States because of our military adventurism in the Middle East. I wish to be clear that I do not think it is remotely justified that 3,000 innocent civilians died because of that, but that was the justification, which bin Laden stated many times, not “our freedoms.”

But once Bush said that—once he stripped the attacks of their specific motivation and assigned to them a fuzzier one that would hit average Americans in their emotional kishkes—he blurred the line of what did and did not constitute legitimate criticism of his government. Now what the United States did to avenge 9/11 was about defending “freedom.” And now, anyone who questioned any action of the administration could easily be branded an enemy of freedom.

And so we arrive at September 26, 2001, when presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer, responding to a late-night joke by Bill Maher, much more conventionally liberal then, said that Americans in this new era “need to watch what they say, watch what they do.” This suggests an atmosphere of Gestapo-like censorship, but in fact none such was even needed. The world—the media, the late-night shows, the Democrats—largely censored itself.

Ah, the Democrats. A moment of national unity was appropriate. Except, ask yourself this: If these attacks had happened under President Gore, do you think Rush Limbaugh would have pled for national unity? Of course not. But still—a moment was appropriate. But only a moment. Once the neocons on the Bush team started exploiting 9/11 for a war that they had wanted to wage since 1991 and that most Democrats opposed, the Democrats should have become a genuine opposition. They failed to do that. They were cowed. They went along.

The hangover from that sad episode extends into our time. Can one draw a line, for example, from the 2002–03 Democrats’ capitulation on Bush’s war to the Democrats’ general confusion last year? I think one can. It’s a different party, with younger people who are less afraid, and who know that their base wants a more pugilistic stance. But some of the leaders are the same people. And even for those in the current leadership who weren’t there in 2001, they seem too often to have inherited the backpedaling caution that characterized the 9/11-era Democrats’ response to Bush’s aggressive posture.

So that’s what happened after 9/11. The Republican Party hijacked this national, indeed international, tragedy to start a war that was a practical and moral calamity (and I can’t write this without at least mentioning the sanctioning by the United States of America of torture and special prisons and CIA “black sites” and more) and to commence a crackdown at home that unleashed deeply reactionary forces. Those forces grew and metastasized as the nation elected its first Black president, and they became bolder and more public with the arrival of a demagogue who stripped the sentiment of its more polished veneer and got matters down to the rough surface. 

I do think there’s a difference between George W. Bush and Donald Trump. I believe that Bush, on a personal level, is a decent man, while Trump is not. But personal decency is not what matters most in a leader. What matters in a leader is what he will and will not do in his public capacity for the sake of political advantage; what moral lines he draws. And Bush, after 9/11, drew a couple good lines, but he drew too many lines that pointed his party in the direction of Trump. On this anniversary, we should not forget this, or absolve him and the people who enabled him.