The FRONTLINE Interviews
Jelani Cobb
Staff Writer, The New Yorker
Jelani Cobb writes about race, politics and history for The New Yorker. He is also a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.
The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore on July 9, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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The Reaction to 9/11
Let's start out with—put your historian hat on first and talk about how important an historic event it was for America, the 9/11 event, and the fact that even the Capitol building was a target and that realm, the importance historically, the fact of one of the targets being the Capitol building.
By and large, because of geography and the particulars of American history, the American public was really not prepared for the idea of an attack on American soil, and so when 9/11 happened, you were reaching deep into the annals of history for precedence.And you could think about, you know, Lee, Robert E. Lee attacking the North during the course of the Civil War; you could think about the War of 1812 when the White House was famously burned.But there isn't a great deal, with the exception of the kind of domestic conflict with Indigenous populations there, there wasn't a great deal of precedent for what happened that day.
And as a consequence, I think it was very easy for people to understand, even at that moment, that we were embarking upon a new era in American history.
And the symbolism of the Capitol?
The Capitol was at the center of this, the heart of these—the attack on the World Trade Center, because those were kind of well-known symbolic structures of American economic might and kind of famous cultural images that they have with the twin towers.But also the attempt to hijack a plane, to destroy the American Congress and the Pentagon, those were attempts to strike at the heart of American political and military power.And I think in the immediate moment, and even in the aftermath of it, the kind of long aftermath of it, we've tended to think mostly about the World Trade Center.But the planned attacks on the U.S. Capitol were central to Al Qaeda's objectives at that point.
We're going to be showing that moment when the congressmen and -women, Republican, Democrats, Black, white, Asian, are all standing on the steps singing “God Bless America.” What does that moment represent?
I think there are images associated with 9/11 that, for people who lived through it, will be indelible.And some of those images, obviously, relate to the destruction that happened that day, but another of those images was the sight of these members of Congress, from their diverse backgrounds, their different states, obviously different parties, political affiliations, all united in the face of this attack on the country, singing “God Bless America.” And it was humbling, I think, in the sense of recognizing that your elected leaders, the most powerful people in the country, are invoking God in this moment of prayer, really, and also kind of giving you a window into the scale of the tragedy that had happened, that you don't really remember 435—however many members of Congress there were that day—out on the Capitol singing in unison.At best, you get those people together for the State of the Union or for joint addresses to Congress from the president.But here we had this regular, heretofore regular September morning, and every elected official we have virtually in D.C. is there singing “God Bless America” in front of the Capitol.
Bush defines the battles to come as being good against evil.Define what that sets in motion.
So from the outset, there was an immediate moment of people kind of coming together and giving a tremendous political mandate to George W. Bush, who was elected by this razor-thin margin, really, in the eyes of many, handed the presidency by the Supreme Court, and what appeared to be just a kind of—what people thought might be a placeholder presidency, really, given the nature of his election.
All of a sudden, this person has a mandate to do anything he wants.And the shock of 9/11 is understood in very stark, simplistic ways.It is a battle of good versus evil.It's not a battle of the present versus history; it's not a battle of forces that have been set loose by the various prerogatives of the Cold War; it is not a question—any of these kind of complicated things that really require thoughtful analysis and reflection.What we get at was good versus evil.In battles where the terms are so starkly defined, you're really justified in doing just about anything.If your opponent is the incarnation of evil, then virtually anything you do falls short of that.And we started to see what that could mean very early.
The Dark Side
The “dark side” direction that [Vice President Dick] Cheney talks about originally and we sort of set off on, based on, of course, the fear, the terrific fear that we're going to be hit with some other attack, so it sort of motivates everything, it seems.But when known, the question is, when known what that meant, what the dark side battle actually meant, how did it affect the domestic audience when we understood—the American audience understood what it really meant to fight a war on the dark side?
So when Dick Cheney made the comments that he made about spending time in the shadows and so on, it was a kind of cryptic thing that in politics could be interpreted in any way.But in short order, we came to understand what that actually meant, and that meant warrantless surveillance of the American public.It meant people being arrested and held under arcane military rules without being charged in Guantanamo.And it meant rendition and black sites.It meant torture.It meant a whole array of things that had heretofore been, if not off limits, then looked at—people tended to look askance at that kind of behavior.And there was at least a recognition that this was contrary to stated American values.
And what 9/11 did was really replace the ideals that we professed in terms of democracy and in terms of moderation and restraint with a single impulse.The singular virtue was survival.
And everything else that was done that was contrary to that was thought to be a kind of effete, liberal, wishy-washy, romantic sentiment, ideas that didn't really recognize— I think that what also happened in the course of this was that anyone who had qualms or criticisms of torture or rendition or any of these behaviors that we thought were off limits, if you had qualms about that, you were thought of as either naïve or disloyal.Those were the two options.And the narrow—the range of possibilities, political possibilities shrank tremendously in the time period that we're talking about.
For Americans, chipping away at the ideals, the tenets that we all thought America was based upon, how does that affect the American people, how they view their government, how they view what we're about?
I think that it's hard to really say early on how people reacted because it was shot through with fear; people were terrified that there was going to be another attack.And that turned out to be the anthrax proliferation in the country that wasn't connected to 9/11, but no one had any way of knowing that.And so there was this existential fear.
But after, in the two years or so after, you started to see fissures, and you started to see fault lines, and it was around whether we should be doing the things that we were doing, whether the best way to fight the kind of conflict we were in would be to shore up American values and principles or to completely jettison them in the name of political and military might.
And I think the most clear instance of that conflict emerging was in Barbara Lee's vote around the authorization for military force for the Bush administration.She was the only person who dissented.And at that point, she received tons of hate mail, tons of criticism.The idea was that she—the only rationale for dissenting against the military, the authorization to use military force after 9/11 would be complete failure to understand the kind of conflict we were in.But the congresswoman was raising a really important point; she was saying this was so overly broad that it could give virtually limitless powers to the presidency and we might embark on actions and behaviors that were not consistent with our own principles and values.And it didn't take very long to realize that she had been the prescient one.
Colin Powell and Weapons of Mass Destruction
[Secretary of State Colin] Powell's speech to the U.N., selling weapons of mass destruction, by what people viewed as one of the most trustworthy leaders certainly in the Bush administration in Washington.Looking back, what was at stake both for Powell and for America with the fact that he was doing it and that he was so successful?
This is really, I think, a pivotal moment in the history of post-9/11, which is, having invaded Afghanistan, having assembled a military force and pursued the places where we knew Al Qaeda had been, the real question was how broad the scope of this war would become and what would happen from there.The public by this point is somewhat skeptical, not willing to give the exact same kind of blank check that the administration had in the early days, the early aftermath of 9/11.And so for Colin Powell to give the argument to, before the U.N., that there was credible evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, that meant everything.He was a person who was, frankly, more believable than George W. Bush or Dick Cheney or likely anyone else in the senior administration.And that moment really, when it turns out, you find out later, there are no such weapons, that moment really, I think, escalates, one, the distrust of the administration and of the government more broadly, and also the fissures and the partisan divides which had already begun to emerge.
So as you said, no weapons of mass destruction were found.How corrosive was it in ruining Americans' belief in the government and what they'd been told and the wars that came post-9/11?
I think that the public wanted to know that if we were going to engage in war, a second front in this war, that it was in pursuit of the people who had actually done this.And one of the striking things that you started to see was the proliferation of the idea that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, and it was a really kind of chilling effect when there was no evidence tying Saddam Hussein to 9/11.And when you combine the false idea that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 with the false idea that he had weapons of mass destruction in his possession, it really just vastly escalated, certainly on the left, escalated the skepticism and the distrust that people had in the government and specifically in the Bush administration.
Contextually, we should also keep in mind that the government was in charge of the terror alert system.The Department of Homeland Security has something that has never existed in our history: these color-coded statuses that indicate just how concerned we should be about the terror threat.It also gives you a tremendous lever over public anxiety; that if you inform the public there's a significant threat, they turn to you and give you the authority to address it.Is there an incentive to maybe gin up the public's fear when you want support for something you're doing politically?Sure.Do you know, does the public know with 100% certainty what exactly is causing the government to raise the terror alert level?No, we don't.
And so it's this kind of open-ended mechanism that keeps the public on the edge of its seat at the same time the stories are coming out that are not consistent with reality.And this is where you start to see, I think, especially as we go further into this, a real serious distrust for what we were doing and a disdain for the direction that the country was headed in; certainly for people who were Democrats and people who were on the left.
People are basically feeling, they're finally realizing they're being manipulated.
People are realizing that they're being manipulated.
Abu Ghraib
So Abu Ghraib, another turning point.What did it say to you when you first saw those pictures?And again, the big question we keep asking, looking back, how did this affect people domestically?How did the drip, drip, drip of what had been taking place that is causing more divisiveness, causing more questions of the government, how did Abu Ghraib play in that whole scenario?
I think Abu Ghraib was important because there's the kind of received wisdom that the images of the coffins of soldiers coming home from Vietnam eroded the public's trust in what we were doing there.There's some dispute about how factual that is, but the point of it, the underlying sentiment is that images matter.When the public saw, for instance, the image of the man being shot through the head in Vietnam and just—people are not prepared to see this, to recognize that there's this kind of casual brutality happening.They began to question, what are we doing here?
Abu Ghraib had a similar effect.For people who wanted to believe that this was a war of good versus evil, it unsettled, at least certain parts of the public, it unsettled them to see people being tortured and tormented in the ways that they were with a kind of almost adolescent glee attached to it.
And so what really, I guess, summarized the divide in the country around the war was that it was a divide really determined by conscience.There were people who saw these images and said they couldn't reconcile that with a just war, and there were people who saw this and thought that it was simply maybe excess or maybe "you don't want to know how the sausage is made; these are things that people do to keep us safe."And that became, I think, the starkest way of analyzing the divisions in the country at that point.
Legacy of the Bush Years
The Bush legacy when we look back—two wars, torture, weapons of mass destruction, the lies that were said—how does this define his place in the history books, do you think?
I think that Bush's position in the history books is a strange one, because by the standard metrics of a presidency, you would say this person oversaw two wars, a tremendous emptying of the coffers to pay for those wars, a titanic erosion of civil liberties, violations of human rights, and then other things—Hurricane Katrina, the tanking of the housing market, gigantic recession.These are the kind of metrics you would typically think about in terms of a presidency.At the same time, it's one of the most consequential presidencies in American history.He served two terms; he was reelected.And we had seldom seen a president able to aggregate that much political power in the course of a presidency.Traditionally, you were thinking about a balance between the executive branch, the legislative brand and the judicial branch.It's not all 33 1/3; the power of those various branches fluctuates with political and public mood and the personalities of particular leaders, and so on.
But for the eight years that he was in power, really, with few parallels—and the ones that come to mind immediately are Lincoln, quite frankly—with few parallels, you see this presidency operating with really, essentially impunity.
The Obama Years
… So let's talk about [President Barack] Obama.Obama is seen as the anti-war president.It's what got him elected.He got the Nobel [Peace] Prize.There's all sorts of attitude towards what he will be.But what was he really?
Most fundamentally, I think Obama was an enigma.And what I mean by that is there was, I think, a kind of what I called a kaleidoscope effect with him that people could look at him from a variety of different vantage points and see completely different things.And for a politician, that is a gigantic advantage.The people who were on the left looked at Obama and saw someone on the left.People who were centrists looked at him and saw a centrist.I think Black people, Black Americans who were descendants of people who had been enslaved looked at him, despite the fact that he did not have a long lineage in the United States, but saw someone who was culturally fluent in ways that said, “He's one of us.” And he had this ability to see—to be in all these different positions.
So the perception of Obama as an anti-war candidate was immensely valuable, especially in the 2008 primaries in which he largely was facing off against Hillary Clinton, who had voted to support the war.And so, lost in that, however, almost in the fine print, was that Obama had consistently said that he was not anti-war; he said he was opposed to “dumb” wars, had categorized the war in Iraq as a dumb war, which was an argument that had a great deal of supporting evidence.
And so people tended to look at him in ways that made him the most favorable version of what they were interested in seeing in a presidential candidate.And so, yeah, that's where we begin with Obama.
Why does he engage in Afghanistan?He's defined it as the “good war” in the campaign.He also, I assume, sees the potential to win.What's his thinking specifically about Afghanistan?We know what he thinks about Iraq.
Well, I mean, Afghanistan is the location that Al Qaeda used in order to attack the United States.And there's an argument that the war in Iraq took attention away from the war in Afghanistan.And then there's this one fundamental reality, which is that you do not want Al Qaeda to be able to reconstitute itself and attack you again, certainly not from that place, that location.
And so all those things, I think, factor into Obama's decision-making as it related to Afghanistan.
Here's the big question, one of the big questions: So Obama believes he can transcend the bad decisions that were made by Bush, the things that went against our values.He believes he can bring those American values back, and so he talks about them in the campaign.But instead, he's ensnared by them.Talk a little bit about that, what he intended and what the realities were.
I think that there's always a danger, which was present if—and discernable if we'd cared to think about it at the time.And that danger is talking idealistically about how you prosecute a war.And Obama was talking very much about returning to positions and approaches that were consistent with American values.
But there were also the exigencies on the ground and the fact that he had to deal with an entire political apparatus, the Republican Party, that was opposed to this approach to the war.And you could see that early on with things like the difficulty in shutting down Guantanamo, which seemed during the course of the campaign to be just, you become president and you make it happen, and then with the complications of what actually happens to all the people who were there, whether or not any of these people are actually dangerous, whether some of these people were not dangerous when they were captured, but over the course of having been tortured and detained for a decade have become so.
And so there are all of these kind of complicated questions that Obama has to grapple with.And I think it makes the way that he actually handles the war look different from the way that he talked about handling the war.
But why can't he transcend these problems?And the effect of his failure on the domestic audience, again, about their view of his government, government in general.
But I don't think anybody could transcend that.I think there was an idea that Obama could—like, the images we saw of Obama as a kind of Superman figure, that always kind of rankled me, and the reason being is that, one, he was a president and he was a politician, and politicians invariably do things you disagree with, and as a human being, human beings invariably have failures and shortcomings.
But the other problem with it was that it shifted the responsibility for changing the state of affairs onto a singular individual, and that individual was the president.The more unsettling reality about the Bush administration wasn't what George Bush did; it was the fact that so much of the public wanted him to do it; that we were fundamentally OK with signing over civil liberties if we thought that it would make us safer and that only we could undo the damage that had been done during the course of that presidency.
I think Obama had, for all the levers and powers and all the abilities that are implicit within the presidency, he had no chance of doing that.I think that was something the American public had to do.
But the effect on people in America and the deterioration of the way they were viewing the wars and the presidents and government, they thought that; they believed that.That's why they put him into office.So when he is not able to do the things that he hoped to do, what's the effect on our society, on the politics and on society?
I mean, I think there's disillusionment, certainly.At the same time, I think that there's a kind of maybe almost a kind of jaded acceptance or cynicism, I think, that emerges, because we see things like drone warfare in the Obama presidency and people think—certainly his critics on the left do—think of this as more consistent with the previous administration than they'd anticipated.They expect a drawdown in the wars more quickly than that happens.The fact that early on, when Obama used SEAL Team Six to neutralize—in the kind of bureaucratic language of politics, but effective, more—effectively to kill Somali kidnappers who were held—holding Americans captive, I think people looked at that and said—some people on the right who looked at that and said, oh, here's a Democrat who's not afraid to use military power, to use military might.I think there were other people who were a little bit maybe concerned or raised the question about whether they were getting more of the same.
And even, I think, really with—the point at which you can see the tension in these things is when Obama gives the Nobel acceptance speech, which is a very odd moment.For one, he's receiving the Nobel Prize.I'm not sure he knows or any of us know exactly why he was receiving the Nobel Prize, but in terms of Nobel speeches, this is probably the most belligerent speech that you have as a Nobel Prize acceptance in talking about the fact that sometimes you have to wage war, or that there is a moral implication to one's willingness to wage warfare, not necessarily peace at any cost.
And so it was the most non-pacifist Peace Prize acceptance that we've ever seen.
Drone Warfare
So he does turn to drone warfare, but with what results?And is it a tool that in the end could win the war?And if not, did they understand the ramifications of the blowback they would get, as you spoke about?
Drone warfare was supposed to do two things.It was supposed to allow Americans to wage warfare from afar and assuage a public that was understandably weary of the numbers of casualties, the numbers of American soldiers who were coming home with permanent and horrific injuries, and there was fatigue around that.And it was also supposed to allow the United States to prosecute this war effectively.And one of the things that immediately becomes apparent, which is the imprecision of these weapons, which is not a shock—aerial bombing is never really entirely precise—but the imprecision of these weapons which lead to massive numbers of civilians being injured, the most notably the wedding party that's bombed by mistake.
And so it really drives the public in a different way for people—if people are tired of seeing American soldiers come back in caskets or with permanent disabilities, then the counterpoint of that is that a certain slice of the public at least is very tired of hearing about other people, innocent individuals in other countries, who were dying or being left with permanent disabilities because of American drone warfare.
We talked about this a little bit, but let's be more specific.Did Bush and Obama, did they understand the complexities of these wars specific to this region, or in general to warfare and the results of it?Was there a naïveté to some extent that was one of the reasons why we went into these quagmires?
I think there was naïveté at the outset because, one, the war was driven by vengeance and idealism.The vengeance part of it was the attempt to eliminate the people whom George W. Bush referred to as the, quote/unquote, “evildoers.” And the idealism was the idea that these places could be remade as Western-style democracies, and even beyond that, that doing so would be relatively straightforward and almost easy.
And so yeah, that—all those ideas are naïve.There's a naïveté implicit in all of that.And we see, I think by the time Obama is elected, that naïveté has been washed away.I don't think that he enters the White House with the same sort of idealism or expectations of what can be achieved in the Middle East, if only because he's seen the six years of warfare that we were engaged in between Bush using the authorization for military force and Obama being elected.
But is there also a lack of understanding of the effect of the use of drones, the idea that Afghanistan possibly was winnable so he went along with the surge to begin with?Is there a learning curve because of a misunderstanding, a lack of understanding of the complexities that he was getting into?
I think it's hard to parse out the kind of learning curve with Obama because he comes into the presidency inheriting this problem.And so sure, yeah, there's a steep learning curve as it relates to prosecuting the war.I don't know that the learning curve would have been any less steep for any other senator who was entering—any other senator who was entering the White House in 2008.
He also has to deal with another aspect of this, along with trying to pick up on these wars and trying to resolve them, which are both quagmires at this point.He's also got to deal at home with the right that is hammering him for his legitimacy, for whether he's a Muslim himself.Talk a little bit about that aspect of trying to deal with these very difficult situations and having the right, the media of the right constantly hammering him and preventing him from moving forward.
I think it was very easy to see after 9/11 and the attacks inside the country that the result was a more truculent, antagonistic version of the United States on the world stage.It was less apparent to people that that same sort of truculence and antagonism was festering in American domestic politics and in our domestic affairs.In some ways, you could see it; you could see the hostility that was directed at Muslim Americans or people who were perceived as Muslim Americans, but it hadn't cohered into an actual movement, into a zeitgeist, a kind of unifying ideal.It took time for that to happen.
But by the time Obama comes to office, you can see what's taking shape—the suspicion that he's a Muslim.We've never really kind of seen a question—he's the first Black president, sure, but we'd never seen this kind of fixation on someone's identity in this particular way, with no evidence.It's kind of weird.There's a huge controversy about the church he belongs to, but despite there being a controversy about his Christian pastor, people are still promoting the idea that he must somehow be Muslim, these things that are irreconcilable.
And that's the very kind of opening mark of it.When we start seeing the Tea Party rallies that, in theory, are about fiscal policy—but that doesn't explain why they have placards of Obama made out to look like a monkey or why they have the kind of virulent racist sloganeering that they utilized in the course of this.And so what really takes shape and begins to cohere in the early days of Obama is that antagonistic, hostile, truculent version of Americanism that had previously been seen mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan and in U.S. foreign affairs.
And then on the left—he's getting it from both sides.So on the left, as you defined to some extent already, he's got the blame for, number one, the wars continuing that he said we were going to get out of.Gitmo's still open.The radical change that people expected, they didn't see.Talk a little bit about the left.He has an enormous amount of things he's attempting to do.He's got the right, as you just defined, pushing against him, and he's also got his own Democratic Party and the left that's also pushing against him.
Yeah.But I think that there's a difference here.So with—Obama's relationship with the left is a little bit more complicated, and one of the reasons I say that is that the emergence of this virulently racist set of critics on the right tended to have a muting effect among his critics on the left, or that people would at least be more hesitant to attack Obama knowing that this was the same guy who had to show his birth certificate to prove that he was an American.And so there's that dynamic as part of it.
At the same time, though, this is not to say he doesn't have his critics, he clearly does.The continuation of the wars become a front for criticism.The—especially in the course, the early course of the Great Recession, there's criticism about his domestic policies there from the left.And really, I think that by the midpoint of his first term, he's occupying a very, very narrow strip of political real estate.
With what result?
Well, for one, it makes it difficult for him to move his agenda forward.There's a kind of stalwart—also, I think one of the things that emerges with Obama is a kind of intransigent opposition which is set to prevent him from effectively acting as president in circumstances.So notably, Mitch McConnell says that his objective is to make Barack Obama a one-term president.Typically, the kind of typical boilerplate speech is that you'll work with the incoming president where you can, but you're going to adhere to your conservative principles; we're going to make sure that you're heard in Washington, etc., etc., etc.
That's not what you get when Obama comes in to office.When Obama comes in to office, it's a line in the sand, trench warfare: We want you to go no further.We want you to do as little of the actual job description of the presidency as we can manage.And that's a kind of novel dynamic that we begin to see take shape then.
… One part of it also is that he also promised to unify.
Yeah, but who could have?Yeah, I don't really—like, the question about Obama being able to unify the country, it's like yeah, then like half the country was calling him a monkey.Like, that wasn't, I think, a possibility for him.
So the idea of there being a kind of American unity coming out of Obama's presidency was idealism.And it was great as political rhetoric, but it conveniently overlooked, or maybe underestimated, just how explosive the reality of a Black man standing every day behind a podium with the seal of the United States presidency in front of it—just how irreconcilable some people would see those two images together.
And so add in to that the expectations about how quickly the war should end or whether the wars should end, the disagreements about drone policy, the disagreements about whether or not the country has ended—has truly ended rendition or the excesses of the Bush administration in terms of aggregating power to the presidency, and what you start to see is a kind of increasingly divisive moment in the United States, only some of which, I think, Barack Obama has any control over.
Doing what to America?Again, that's our film, is where are we now and what's going on and how many rocks are coming down that side of the mountainside.
Sure.I'm hesitant, though—I'm hesitant, though, to cosign the idea that Obama—I mean, I think that Obama's prosecution of the war was divisive—the wars was divisive and whether or not he reined in the kind of military impulse that came out of 9/11.But I think a lot of the disunity that came out was simply the fact that people hated him because he was Black, and that was increasingly apparent over the course of time.
And so the dynamics of—the kind of racism that 9/11 set loose directed at Muslims, directed at people of color more broadly, the permission to vent your worst impulses, that consequence of 9/11 was soon enough directed at Obama himself.People felt empowered to speak to him in ways that they would never dream of speaking about an American president.
By the way, he killed Osama bin Laden.That was almost forgotten.It was almost overlooked in the course of his presidency.It was a mere speed bump on the road to painting him as a kind of incarnation of anti-American values.
… On the Iraq thing, he had promised to leave, but did it come back to haunt him?How did it come back to haunt him?
Well, you mean him being criticized on the right for, quote/unquote, “cutting and running”?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, that kind of thing?It was apparent, I think, throughout Obama's presidency that whatever position he took, there was going to be a chorus of criticism on the right, even when he adopted positions that people on the right had held.And so ending the war in Iraq became convenient fodder for saying the United States had cut and run.You heard some of those lines of criticism from people like Sarah Palin about the war.And at the same time, there's an emerging kind of chorus of people saying, why are we engaged in endless wars?It seemed to be a kind of no-win situation, at least in terms of the politics of it, but increasingly also evidence of the kind of divisiveness of American foreign policy, of American policy as it related to his presidency at all, period.
By the end, Obama's focus was not on the wars.Ben Rhodes said at some point they realized that Afghanistan was not winnable; they just had to keep it going to try to get the Afghanis [sic] involved.But he knows that in the end he's passing them on to [Donald] Trump.He couldn't do what he had promised to do.Talk about the dynamics of that, and again the disillusionment that that brought as well and how that added to a divide that allows a Trump to be elected.
Well, I think that—for people who were cynical about politics, and Obama famously, throughout the course of his presidency, was critical of cynicism as a habit, as an outlook, but for people who were cynical about politics, they came away from his presidency with evidence to say, “See?I told you.” It wasn't so much the question of what was politically possible; it was simply the idea of a president promising more than he was able to deliver.
And what happens, I think, in the context of that, along with a bunch of other things, including the surging tides of racism in American political—in American life, it created the opportunity for a different kind of figure to emerge and say that I'm not a politician; I'm above politics; I'm outside politics; I'm something different, a person that people believed that they knew because they had seen him on reality TV every week for years.And the idea that you have no experience, whatsoever, is, in that particular moment, able to be utilized as an asset as opposed to a liability.
The Trump Years
So Trump is very smart about using the 9/11 fear that still exists in America and over 15 years of what a lot of people perceive as lies and failure, certainly failure to win, and failure to live up to promises.How does he do that?And how he blames Obama as a big part of it, how does he do that, and why is that successful?
I think that there's a lot to be said about how Trump was able to utilize the Obama presidency and the preceding years of the war.I think the most gross distillation is that he was able to use racism to justify his racism.And so in trafficking in the most stereotypical and racist ideas of Obama, who Obama was and what Obama did or did not do, he was able to then say, and the problem is that we have not reined in these people who hate us, who are Muslim, who look like this, who do these sorts of things, and so on, and saying that he would bomb, quote/unquote, “bomb the hell out of them” if he was elected, and all these kind of arguments.Blatantly lied, saying that Muslims cheered after the twin towers fell.That wasn't true.The public was uninterested in the fact that that was a lie.
And so it is really a kind of demagogic equation.It's racism squared.It's using all of the worst impulses and harnessing them, but also telling the public that they've been suckered in particular ways, that all these people were either inept or incompetent or disloyal, and famously saying he was the only person who could fix it.
So by 2020, he's fighting a new war.He's rebranding the threat.The existential enemy now is antifa, Black Lives Matter, socialist Democrats.What's he doing here, and the effect on how that affects—certainly it draws in his base—but the effect on this division that has been growing in America?
So I think one of the most important things was that the Obama administration recognized the growth of radical-right militias in the course of his presidency.They put out a report on it.They've stated—they were very clear that this dynamic was happening.But it wasn't until Trump that you began to see these people gain a real entrée into the political mainstream.And the innovation that Trump used, like many a great demagogue that preceded him, was to switch—the reason we have not been successful abroad, in dealing with our enemies abroad, is the fact that we have not dealt with our enemies at home; that we have enemies within the country who are responsible for us being weakened on the world stage, responsible for us being a laughingstock or us being taken advantage of.
And so rather than saying we need to primarily be focused on these people—and of course there's a lot of trafficking in stereotypes as related to Muslims and people from the Middle East—but the primary concern is that you have to deal with the corrosive elements that are destroying American power from within.And from there, there's almost a kind of paint-by-numbers in terms of the politics that we see—when we see people mailing letter bombs to members of Congress and the media that have been critical of Donald Trump; when we see instances of violence spiking, hate crimes increasing; when we see all the things that lead to saying that our public, or at least a significant portion of our public now believes that its biggest concern are other Americans who don't think or vote like them.
And so there's a pivot that happens, and that pivot is likely one of the most dangerous developments we've seen in modern American history.
We're going to talk about Jan. 6 next.
But also he uses the same tools that were being used—he wanted to use the military; he wanted to use the National Guard; he wants to use DHS.
Not only do you have to neutralize these enemies, these domestic enemies through politics, which is the kind of normal course of things, you have to utilize brutality and violence.Notably, he gives carte blanche to his followers to beat people up in the course of his rallies.When he's elected to the presidency, you just see an extension of that, most glaringly in 2020, in the summer of 2020, when you see unnamed, unidentified, unidentifiable federal agents being dispatched to the sites of protests after the death of George Floyd, federal agents being dispatched to sites of protests around the country.And that chilling image of the military helicopter flying low to intimidate the protesters in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House—we have seldom seen this kind of display of military force used on American soil against American citizens.And so the idea that this war has to be prosecuted abroad becomes almost quaint; there's a war that has to be prosecuted at home.And the public, at least that portion of the public that is enrolled in this idea, they understand that explicitly.
And then the Big Lie, why it works, a culmination of everything that Trump has done before, a culmination of what's taken place post-9/11.Why?
So I think that there's a kind of dual track.One is the erosion of faith in government.And we can see that in public opinion polls.We see that the public generally has a low opinion of government, low degree of trustworthiness in—that they see in people who are elected officials, and so on.
And we have a political leader who has a fanatically loyal following.They don't trust government.They believe anything he says.And so when he accuses the government of having stolen the election, data and facts are irrelevant because the people who are producing this data and the people who are putting out these facts are already questionable in the eyes of his followers.
And so it is from there, I think, a very short step to weaponizing that public against the people who they don't trust.
Twenty Years Later
So Jan. 6: Sum up the why of it all.It's the consequence of all the decisions, of all the administrations, leading from Bush to Obama, who would never have been elected without Bush, to Trump, who would never have been elected without Obama.Jan. 6: What are the reasons for the fact that this thing took place in America against the same building that Al Qaeda had tried to bring down on 9/11?
I think there's a way that you can look at Jan. 6 and see it as a culmination of 20 years of politics that preceded it, but I think there's also a very obvious irony, which is that after the attacks, the planned attack on the U.S. Capitol, Al Qaeda failed, and, in effect, thousands of Americans said, “Don't worry; we'll do it for you."And the more nuanced view of what Osama bin Laden had been attempting with the attacks on the Capitol were not simply to destroy infrastructure and buildings and humiliate the United States on the world stage, but it was to convince the United States to take actions that would be in the long term destructive to the stability of American society, American democracy.
When Osama bin Laden looked at Afghanistan, he saw the locale that had destroyed the Soviet Union, that the Soviet Union's engagement in Afghanistan had precipitated its decline and disillusion, and he thought that the United States could be tricked into doing the same thing in the same place.And in 2021, in large measure as a consequence of actions that were taken in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, you began to see actions that at very—the very least were consistent with what Osama bin Laden had hoped to see in 2001.
One more to wrap it up.What does this insurrection that takes place on Jan. 6 tell us about how America has changed since 9/11, since that singing that took place on the steps on 9/11?
I think it's inescapable that images from Jan. 6 illustrate the degree to which American democracy has become more fragile and more feeble and more endangered in the 20 years since the onset of the war on terror.
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