Trump Again Disgraces a Sacred American Space

The bar for tastelessness in American politics has dropped precipitously in the last decade. It’s even dropped in the last 24 hours. Nonetheless, it takes a unique 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 commemorative events in New York and Pennsylvania today. As part of his entourage, he brought along 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 worked to distance him from her, though they have been stymied by Trump himself.

[David A. Graham: What was he even talking about?]

The relevant information here is that just last year, Loomer shared a video alleging that the attacks were “an inside job.” As noted by NBC’s Vaughn Hillyard and further explained by the liberal organization Media Matters, Loomer wrote on X that the Bush administration staged the attacks to cover up a government loss of trillions of dollars. (No such money was lost, and the U.S. government didn’t do 9/11.) This is who Trump thought to bring along with him to events commemorating the deaths of thousands of Americans.

Such flippancy is appalling but perhaps not shocking. Despite being a lifelong New Yorker and saying he watched the attacks happen, Trump has never seemed to grasp their seriousness. His first reaction on that day was to boast that one of his signature buildings, 40 Wall Street, was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan. (It wasn’t.) Trump has also claimed that he helped clear rubble (no evidence for this exists) and that he hired a crew to assist in the cleanup (ditto).

Even so, he’s been happy to wield 9/11 as a political cudgel. In 2010, he joined other conservative voices campaigning against a Muslim cultural center planned for lower Manhattan, which was dubbed the Ground Zero mosque, though it was neither a mosque nor especially close to Ground Zero. As The Atlantic reported in 2019, his advocacy “for the first time gave him national visibility on the political right.” Reprising this bigotry a few years later, he claimed to have watched as thousands of Muslims celebrated the attacks in Jersey City, something that never happened.

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump: Americans who died in war are “losers” and “suckers”]

Then again, Trump has never seemed to grasp solemnity. In 2018, as The Atlantic’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg reported, the then-president skipped a visit to an American World War I cemetery in France, dismissing the men interred there as “losers.” Last month, he attempted to use Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery, some of the most hallowed territory at one of the nation’s most hallowed places of rest, as a prop for campaign messaging, and when a cemetery staffer objected, his aides got into a physical confrontation with her.

Trump’s gaucherie is echoed by some of his supporters. A widely shared 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 like they’re attending a political rally. Except it was a ceremony to memorialize more than 2,600 people brutally murdered by terrorists.

[Read: Trump’s racism: an oral history]

This is tacky and offensive, and a president who lacks empathy tends to stumble at the soft-power parts of his job. But this failure to grasp the importance of an event like 9/11 connects to a failure to grasp its policy implications as well. During last night’s debate, Trump once again railed against NATO. “We were being ripped off by European nations both on trade and on NATO,” he said. Earlier this year, he said he’d encourage Russia to attack NATO members if they didn’t meet defense spending targets.

Trump must have forgotten or never bothered to learn that NATO’s mutual-defense agreement has only been invoked once—when members of the alliance agreed to assist the United States after the September 11 attacks. In Loomer’s mind, maybe this doesn’t mean anything, since it was an inside job anyway. Does Trump live in Loomer’s world or the real world?