In the charcoal clouds that rose from the rubble of the twin towers on 11 September 2001, Donald Trump eyed a silver lining. One of his buildings, a short walk away from Ground Zero, he reckoned, had just become the tallest skyscraper in Lower Manhattan.
His property at 40 Wall Street, he told the New York radio station WWOR, “actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Centre, was the tallest – and then, when they built the World Trade Centre, it became known as the second-tallest. And now it’s the tallest.”
Almost three thousand people had just been killed. America was experiencing a modern-day Pearl Harbour. Trump’s home city was in a state of collective trauma, and yet it appeared bragging rights were in the forefront of his mind: the boast – a false one as it turned out – that his building stood taller than any other in a part of the city now covered in dust and debris.
Nothing Trump said or did that day marked him out as a future president, though he had toyed with a run for the White House as early as the 2000 election. The New Yorker who rose to the challenge of that awful moment was the city’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, who would later become one of Trump’s most sycophantic loyalists.
A quarter century on, however, it is possible to draw a line from the attacks of 9/11 to Trump’s shock victory in 2016. Without it, Trump might never have become President.
Trump became a political beneficiary of the forever wars that followed, even though he had actually supported the war in Iraq ahead of the Bush administration’s invasion. Americans tired of fighting open-ended conflicts, and in 2016 voters warmed to a candidate who pledged to make America great again without starting any new wars.
United Airlines flight 175 approaches the south tower of the World Trade Centre as smoke billows from the north tower in lower Manhattan, New York on September 11, 2001 (Photo: Seth McAllister/AFP via Getty Images)Back in 2015, former Florida governor, Jeb Bush, the brother of George W. Bush, had been the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. Slamming the Iraq war helped Trump bring the Bush presidential dynasty to an end.
“The war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right?” Trump said in a Republican debate in February 2016, taking aim at Jeb Bush. “We spent $2tn, thousands of lives, we don’t even have it. Iran is taking over Iraq with the second-largest oil reserves in the world.”
Bush, who Trump repeatedly mocked as a “low energy” candidate, never recovered. He became collateral damage in his brother’s unpopular and strategically calamitous war.
The economic consequences of the Iraq war also played into Trump’s hands. It was not just the mammoth financial cost to the US, estimated to be between $1.5 and $3 trillion. The effect on the global economy was enormous, too.
The price of oil soared from $25 a barrel at the start of the conflict to $140 a barrel in 2008. As oil prices spiked, the US Federal Reserve cut interest rates to guard against an “oil shock” recession. Home buyers took advantage of cheap loans, and the housing bubble became dangerously over-inflated. This, in turned, arguably fuelled the sub-prime crisis that contributed greatly to the recession of 2008/9.
An American soldier watches as a statue of Saddam Hussein falls in central Baghdad, days after the US invasion of Iraq began in 2003 (Photo: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters)The collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008 had a greater material effect on many American lives than the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11. Millions lost faith in the economy to deliver improvements to their standards of living, and when Trump declared in 2015 that the American Dream was dead, his words found an echo in the hollowed-out communities of the Rust Belt.
The derelict wastelands of the old industrial heartland states – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in particular, which turned from Democratic blue to Republican red – became the seedbed of Trumpism.
The terror attacks 25 years ago upended American politics. Just take the issue of immigration. During the first year of his presidency, George W. Bush had sought to liberalise US immigration policies in negotiations with Mexico. The US economy was so reliant on sources of cheap labour that immigration was seen back then as primarily an economic issue.
After 9/11, it came to be regarded as a national security issue, which it remains to this day.
America, an immigrant nation, became less welcoming for new arrivals. Islamophobia and nativism became more commonplace: between 2000 and 2001, there was a 1,700 per cent rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes.
Rural areas of states like Pennsylvania swung behind Donald Trump after feeling increasingly left behind (Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images)By 2016, Americans were ready to elect as president a nativist firebrand who launched his campaign with an attack on Mexican immigrants and who called for a ban on immigrants from mainly Islamic countries. During his first campaign, Trump even claimed, misleadingly, that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey had celebrated the destruction of the World Trade Centre.
The new politics of 9/11, and the forever wars that came afterwards, helped Trump in other ways, too. Barack Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war helped him defeat Hillary Clinton in 2008 for the Democratic presidential nomination, and then Senator John McCain, a Republican who had been a vehement supporter of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, for the presidency itself.
After entering the White House, Obama became an ideal foil for Trump, who rose to political prominence as the untitled leader of the Birther movement, which questioned the very legitimacy of America’s first Black president. Trump then positioned himself as the most vehemently anti-Obama candidate in the 2016 Republican primaries.
That year, Hillary Clinton was weighed down by her support for the Iraq war. It put her on the defensive, even though there was no evidence to support Trump’s claim that “I did not support the war in Iraq”.
Barack Obama meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office on 10 November, 2016 (Photo: Jim Watson/AFP)In what must have felt like an especially cruel trick of history, on 11 September 2016, after attending commemorations marking the 15th anniversary of the attacks, Clinton stumbled and fell as she got into her waiting van. “She can’t make it 15 feet to her car,” Trump said afterwards, claiming Clinton didn’t have the stamina to be president. “She has been a disaster,” he added.
Over the past 250 years, New York has often been the cockpit of American history. From George Washington’s escape over the East River to his swearing in as the country’s first president, and from the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge to the Wall Street crash in 1929, it has played a key role. The same is true of the 21st century, especially when it comes to Donald Trump.
From the attacks on 9/11 to the celebrations at a Manhattan hotel on the night of 8 November 2016, when a New York property tycoon found out he was about to take up residence at the White House, New York has been a key player in his rise. And make no mistake, those two events are inextricably linked.
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