Twenty-five years after 9/11, one has to ask: has the nightmare ever really ended?
For a quarter-century, Americans have been governed by fear: fear of terrorists and foreign enemies, fear of domestic extremists and political opponents, fear of the next attack, the next crisis, the next emergency.
That fear has given us endless war, mass surveillance, militarized police, secret courts, indefinite detention, government watchlists, domestic military deployments and an imperial presidency armed with powers that would have been unthinkable before 9/11.
Now the man entrusted with the imperial powers of the modern-day presidency is publicly imagining himself enthroned over robotic armies, raining destruction on his enemies and promising nightmares.
The imagery may be unhinged from reality, but the powers of the presidency are not.
Neither are the questions raised by Trump’s increasingly unhinged public behavior about whether any president — especially one armed with the accumulated powers of the post-9/11 national-security state — is mentally and temperamentally fit to wield them.
That is where America’s two great anniversaries of 2026 collide.
On July 4, America celebrated 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, born from a revolt against King George III and a system in which too much power rested in the hands of one ruler. At its heart was the radical proposition that government derives its just powers from the consent of the people.
On September 11, we mark 25 years since the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, shattered the nation’s sense of security, and set in motion a massive expansion of presidential, military and national-security power.
America began by rebelling against a king.
Two hundred and fifty years later, we have created a presidency with increasingly king-like powers.
And now we must confront an uncomfortable question the Founders understood all too well: what happens when immense power is placed in the hands of someone whose fitness to wield it is itself in question?
To understand how we arrived at this dangerous moment, we have to go back to the moment when fear gave the government permission to begin dismantling the restraints on its power.
That trail leads inevitably back to 9/11.
A quarter-century later, serious questions and suspicions persist about what government officials knew before the attacks, what warnings were ignored, whether more could have been done to prevent them, and whether the American people have ever been given the full story of 9/11.
Those questions deserve scrutiny, but they should not obscure what we know happened next.
Whatever the truth about what the government knew before 9/11, there can be little dispute about what the government did afterward. It used the attacks and the fear they generated to radically expand its powers over the American people.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the “war on terror” has become a war without end, the emergency has become permanent, the surveillance state has become omnipresent, the police have become militarized, and the presidency has accumulated powers that would have horrified the revolutionaries of 1776.
This is the bitter irony of America at 250.
We declared our independence from a government that subjected its people to standing armies, arbitrary searches, taxation without meaningful representation and the dictates of a ruler who considered himself above the law.
Yet over the course of the past 25 years, in the name of national security, we have resurrected many of those same evils and wrapped them in the American flag.
What did 25 years of surrendering liberty in exchange for security actually buy us?
Not peace. Not security. Not fiscal stability. Not a less intrusive government.
Instead, we got the Patriot Act and mass surveillance; secret courts and government watchlists; indefinite detention and torture; militarized police; endless wars and trillions in debt; and a presidency increasingly untethered from Congress, the courts and constitutional restraint.
And still the government insists it needs more power to keep us safe.
That is the trap.
Twenty-five years later, the emergency never ended — it became the government.
Every president since has inherited the machinery of the post-9/11 national-security state. Every president has found new ways to use it. And almost none of the powers claimed in the name of emergency have ever been willingly surrendered.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in the return to preemptive war.
Twenty-five years after 9/11 plunged the United States into a cycle of preemptive war, blowback and permanent emergency, President Trump has launched another preemptive war against Iran without a declaration of war by Congress.
The circle is complete.
9/11 gave us the War on Terror. The War on Terror gave us permanent emergency. Permanent emergency gave us the imperial presidency. And the imperial presidency has given us another war.
But war abroad has a way of coming home.
The result is a country in which the dividing line between soldier and police officer, battlefield and neighborhood, foreign enemy and domestic suspect has become dangerously blurred.
The same vicious cycle has played out with surveillance.
Once the government acquires a weapon, it rarely gives it back.
Twenty-five years ago, Osama bin Laden predicted that the American government would lead its own people into “an unbearable hell and a choking life.”
Bin Laden did not defeat America. He did not destroy the Constitution.
We are doing that ourselves.
Every time we accept another surveillance program because we’re afraid, the Fourth Amendment dies a little more. Every time we tolerate another war because we’re told it will make us safe, constitutional restraints on war-making die a little more. Every time Congress surrenders power and the courts defer to “national security,” the rule of law dies a little more. Every time we allow the government to turn another American community into a battlefield, the barrier between military force and civilian government dies a little more.
Every time we shrug and tell ourselves that the latest encroachment on liberty is temporary, necessary or would only be used against someone else, the Constitution dies a little more.
As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how freedom dies in a country that still calls itself free.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the question is no longer whether terrorism poses the greatest threat to our freedoms.
The question is whether the American Police State itself has become the greater threat.
About John & Nisha Whitehead:
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His latest books The Erik Blair Diaries and Battlefield America: The War on the American People are available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected]. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
