It takes a special kind of vulgarity to bring a 9/11 “truther” to events marking the anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
The bar for bad taste in American politics has dropped rapidly over the past decade. It has even dropped in the past 24 hours. Still, it takes a special kind of vulgarity to bring a 9/11 “truther” to events marking the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
The culprit is former President Donald Trump, who attended memorial events in New York and Pennsylvania today. As part of his entourage, he brought Laura Loomer, a right-wing activist and former Republican presidential candidate. Loomer has a long history of offensive remarks, and Trump’s advisers have often tried to distance him from her, despite being blocked from doing so by Trump himself.
The relevant information here is that just last year, Loomer shared a video claiming the attacks were “an inside job.” As NBC’s Vaughn Hillyard noted and liberal organization Media Matters for America further explained, Loomer wrote on X that the Bush administration staged the attacks to cover up a trillions of dollars’ loss to the government. (No such money was lost, and the U.S. government was not responsible for 9/11.) These are the people Trump wanted to bring to the memorial services for the deaths of thousands of Americans.
Such flippancy is appalling, but perhaps not shocking. Although Trump was a lifelong New Yorker and said he lived through the attacks, he never seemed to grasp how serious the attacks were. His first reaction that day was to boast that one of his most iconic buildings, 40 Wall Street, was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan. (It wasn’t.) Trump has also claimed to have helped clear the rubble (there is no evidence of this) and hired a crew to help with the cleanup (also).
Still, he has been fond of using 9/11 as a political weapon. In 2010, he joined other conservative voices in opposing a Muslim cultural center planned in Lower Manhattan that was nicknamed the “Ground Zero Mosque” even though it was neither a mosque nor particularly close to Ground Zero. The Atlantic As reported in 2019, his activism gave him “national visibility on the political right for the first time.” When he revisited this bigotry a few years later, he claimed he had watched thousands of Muslims celebrate the Jersey City attacks, which never happened.
On the other hand, Trump never seemed to understand anything about celebration. In 2018, when The Atlantic As executive editor Jeffrey Goldberg reported, the then-president skipped an American World War II cemetery in France, dismissing the men buried there as “losers.” Last month, he tried to use Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery, one of the most sacred areas at one of the nation’s most hallowed resting places, as a prop for his campaign message. When a cemetery worker objected, his aides got into a physical altercation with her.
Trump’s awkwardness is shared by some of his supporters. A widely circulated clip from today’s ceremony in Manhattan shows Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris greeting each other, but in the background fans can be heard shouting “Woo!” and chanting Trump’s name as if they were attending a political rally. Except it was a ceremony commemorating over 2,600 people brutally murdered by terrorists.
That’s tasteless and offensive, and a president who lacks empathy is prone to stumbling over the soft power elements of his office. But that failure to grasp the significance of an event like 9/11 is also matched by a failure to grasp its political implications. During yesterday’s debate, Trump again railed against NATO. “We have been betrayed by the European nations both in trade and in NATO,” he said. Earlier this year, he said he would encourage Russia to attack NATO members if they failed to meet their defense spending targets.
Trump must have forgotten, or never bothered to consider, that NATO’s mutual defense agreement has only been invoked once – when the alliance’s members agreed to help the United States after the 9/11 attacks. In Loomer’s eyes, that may not mean anything at all, since it was an inside job anyway. Does Trump live in Loomer’s world or the real world?
