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Opinion
25 Years After 9/11, It’s Clear Osama bin Laden Won—But He Didn't Do It Alone
In the end, the Saudi-born terrorist's role in the victory he sought turned out to be vanishingly small.
Sep 11, 2026
I can still remember the smell. But I’m at a loss to accurately describe it to you. It wasn’t the unmistakable odor of death, although that must have been some tiny part of it. It wasn’t like burning tires or plastic or even metal. It was all that, but it was more.
In the quarter century since, I’ve been all over the world, but I’ve never experienced anything like the smell near the rubble pile at Ground Zero in September 2001. The air was acrid and thick, a swirl of toxins and carcinogens made possible by turning two large, jet-fuel laden planes into cruise missiles and aiming them at gigantic office towers. As it burned, we all inhaled a haze of pulverized cement, glass fibers, asbestos, lead, dioxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls (better known as PCBs), and whatever else. It remains a part of us still.
The 9/11 attacks — which killed almost 3,000 Americans, toppled New York City’s Twin Towers, wrecked the Pentagon, and took down a plane near Shanksville, Pennsylvania — marked the most devastating intelligence failure in U.S. history and sent the United States into a paroxysm of self-induced catastrophes from which it has never emerged. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s spectacular coordinated assault supercharged what had been a slow-motion imperial decline, trapping the U.S. in a death spiral of ruinous intertwined economic debacles, foreign policy failures, democratic backsliding, authoritarianism, and debilitating wars and military interventions.
Bin Laden’s plan was to trap the U.S. in expensive, foreign quagmire wars that would trigger a domestic economic collapse. It was patterned on the strategy that the local mujahideen, he and other foreign fighters, and the U.S. and its allies had used to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Not only does bin Laden’s strategy continue apace long after his 2011 death, but it also spawned an even more effective means of destroying America from within. Bin Laden’s attacks turned the U.S. government into an engine for the destruction of America, inducing it to implement policies that have devastated the country and immiserated its people. That includes unrestrained spending while cutting taxes on the rich, closer ties with despotic regimes, the sneak-and-peek warrants and roving wiretaps of the Patriot Act and other domestic surveillance programs, and the ruinous failed forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
This swirl of toxic policies and governmental overreach opened the door to something beyond bin Laden’s wildest dreams, the rise of an even more effective terrorist who has crippled the U.S. in countless ways and sought to strangle the best of the country: President Donald Trump.
The so-called Pearl Harbor of the 21st century was no surprise. Long before President George W. Bush, while vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, received a classified intelligence memo titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S,” the Al Qaeda leader had been honest about his plans. “The call to wage war against America was made because America has spear-headed the crusade against the Islamic nation,” he announced in a 1998 TV interview, castigating the U.S. for stationing troops in the Middle East and its support of Israel. “The Western regimes and the government of the United States of America bear the blame for what might happen. If their people do not wish to be harmed inside their very own countries, they should seek to elect governments that are truly representative of them and that can protect their interests.”
When bin Laden made good on his threats, slaughtering thousands on 9/11, he knew it was bound to trigger a response. One possibility was a measured law-enforcement action that would end with arrests and legitimate legal proceedings. The other was a president standing on a rubble pile, vowing revenge, a never-ending fruitless war against a tactic (terror), a secret torture gulag, a forever prison, and a kangaroo court. One would be ruinous for bin Laden. The other, an answer to his prayers.
Bin Laden’s masterstroke was to attack the U.S. after it had elected a lightweight nepo-baby president and a power-mad vice president who had cut his teeth in Richard Nixon’s criminal-packed White House. While he came to be an enemy of Donald Trump, it was Dick Cheney who paved the way for America’s current would-be tyrant, with the vice president’s relentless campaign to concentrate power in the White House, creating an imperial presidency predicated on the “unitary executive theory,” a misbegotten notion that the Constitution grants the president unrestrained authority over domestic and foreign policy, such as unilaterally removing government officials and waging wars.
In both style and substance, Cheney prefigured Trump. In the immediate wake of 9/11, Cheney went on TV to announce the government would now operate on the “dark side,” as he put it, claiming “a lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion.”
America has never emerged from those sinister shadows. Cheney was arguably the leading cheerleader for the ruinous war on terror, which began in Afghanistan, spread across the globe, and grinds on a year after his death; a prime architect of the disastrous Iraq War and the faulty, unverified, and cherry-picked intelligence that underpinned it; an enthusiastic supporter of torture, calling the waterboarding of detainees “a no-brainer”; a vocal supporter of domestic surveillance; a promoter of undemocratic, unprecedented, and unparalleled secrecy; and a belligerent bully.
“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a 2022 ad for his daughter, Liz, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump at the end of his first term. He might have been right — and he was certainly responsible. Trump has built on Cheney’s accomplishments and pushed America toward autocracy at an unprecedented rate.
After weakening American democracy during his first term, Trump launched a full-scale assault — literally — on it. Despite knowing he lost the 2020 presidential election, Trump refused to concede, worked to subvert vote counts and undermine the certification process, pressured state officials to “find” votes, and orchestrated what special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on it called an “unprecedented criminal effort” to remain in power.
Bin Laden was never able to raise an army in America, lead an insurrection, and launch an attack on the U.S. Capitol. (The plane meant to carry out that attack on 9/11 crashed in rural Pennsylvania.) But on January 6, 2021, with Trump’s encouragement, his supporters stormed the Capitol. The House Select Committee that investigated the “domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex and issues relating to the interference with the peaceful transfer of power” concluded that Trump engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 Presidential election.” It found that Trump, for hours, deliberately failed to act to stop his followers from attacking the Capitol. Smith said that the evidence gathered by his team “was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” had the American people not reelected Trump.
Bin Laden would have no doubt cheered the attack on the Capitol and endorsed Trump’s reelection run, had he been alive. And he would not have been disappointed by the results. Upon returning to office, Trump unleashed a coordinated assault on American democracy, undermining the rule of law and fundamental freedoms by pardoning and rewarding insurrectionists; weaponizing the Justice Department, regulatory agencies, and the military against American citizens; firing government watchdogs; attacking the free press; engaging in naked and unrestrained corruption, such as violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause; engaging in due process violations, immigration lawlessness, and unconstitutional executive power-grabs; and launching a disastrous war with Iran and a murder-spree on the high seas amid a host of other foreign and domestic policy fiascos.
Since January 2025, there have been nearly 4,000 separate authoritarian acts by the Trump administration including around 1,050 undermining democracy, more than 940 suppressing dissent, over 650 aggressive or destabilizing foreign policy efforts, about 600 acts weakening civil rights, around 500 centered around controlling information or spreading misinformation, and more than 320 acts of corruption, according to the Trump Action Tracker, which documents acts and statements of Trump and his administration that echo those of other authoritarian regimes.
A startling global analysis also discovered “autocratization” in America rose at a speed “unprecedented in modern history” last year. Under Trump, the researchers found, the U.S. has ceased to be a functioning liberal democracy after the largest one-year drop in democratic principles in American history. This took the country back to 1965 levels, when Jim Crow racial discrimination in voting — including violence and intimidation, poll taxes, and literacy tests — were still commonplace. These results are bolstered by research by the nonprofit group Protect Democracy, which finds that the corrupting of elections, quashing of dissent, spreading of disinformation, and aggrandizing of executive power are all “escalating” in Trump’s second term, while both authoritarian actions and the politicizing of independent institutions in the U.S. are “rapidly escalating.”
In 2001, the U.S. government recorded a budget surplus of about $128 billion and was projected to pay off the national debt by 2009. But after miring the U.S. in forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere, bin Laden looked upon the fruits of 9/11 and took a victory lap in 2004, bragging that his strategy of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy” had helped to push the U.S. deficit to “more than a trillion dollars.”
“All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note,” bin Laden announced.
He could not have imagined just how closely and how long America’s leaders would hue to his plan, conducting commando raids, drone strikes, armed interventions, and outright wars in Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and elsewhere. Nor could Al Qaeda’s leader have foreseen how deep into financial ruin the U.S. would sink as a result.
Bin Laden’s 2004 trillion-dollar boast wasn’t actually accurate. The U.S. federal deficit was just $413 billion in 2004. But it wouldn’t remain that low for long. America’s post-9/11 wars have now cost or caused long-term obligations to taxpayers of an astonishing $8 trillion, according to a 2021 analysis by Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
And Trump has continued to expand America’s ruinous foreign interventions from Ecuador to Iran. An Intercept analysis found that Trump has presided over more than 20 armed conflicts and wars during his two terms in office. And the costs continue adding up. Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce and currently a public policy professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, previously told The Intercept that the excessive expenses of the Iran war, alone, would likely reach into the trillions of dollars. And Trump is also currently pushing for a post-World War II record $1.6 trillion Pentagon budget for next year.
In case you hadn’t guessed, the pre-9/11 projection that the national debt would be paid off in 2009 never came to pass. Instead, the Bush and Trump presidencies were marked by massive tax cuts that mostly benefited corporations and the wealthiest Americans, depriving the Treasury of almost $10 trillion in expected revenue.
So after bin Laden’s attack; the forever wars of Bush, Barack Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden; and Trump’s contributions in disastrous conflicts and gross fiscal mismanagement, the $5.8 trillion national debt of 2001 has now ballooned by 590 percent to a staggering $40 trillion. That’s $1 million, 40 million times over.
About 50 percent of the debt has been accrued since Donald Trump was first elected. This week, Trump pledged to pay every American adult $5,000 if Republicans keep control of Congress in November, which would cost more than $1 trillion. And that $128 billion budget surplus from 2001? It’s been replaced by a projected federal budget deficit for this fiscal year of $2.1 trillion. This debt and deficit spiral is also occurring during a time of near-full employment when the government’s finances should actually be improving.
If bin Laden made it to paradise, as was his hope, he is no doubt smiling as the Trump administration dismisses the ballooning debt and the president peddles nonsensical claims that “growth will take care of that very easily.” The U.S. will actually spend more than $1 trillion this year just paying interest on the debt. The Peterson Foundation projects that total interest payments will more than double over the next decade — and that may be an undercount. And even if the debt remained steady at $40 trillion and the United States were to pay down $1 million per day, it would take almost 110,000 years to pay it off.
All this debt is also likely to keep interest rates high, raising the cost of mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, and small business credit, hurting ordinary Americans. High deficits and debt — particularly if coupled with high inflation or interest rates — make it harder for the government to respond to crises like a recession, depression, pandemic, or other emergency.
Then there is the weakened safety net that comes from deficits and debt. Bin Laden doesn’t need to worry about his golden years, and Trump is living them right now at taxpayer expense. But in 2032 — just six years from now — the Social Security trust fund is on track to go bust, to take one example of shortfalls on the horizon. By law, when the trust fund hits zero, all retirees’ benefits are mandated to drop by more than 20 percent.
Looking back, I’ve come to think of the acrid odor of the collapsed Twin Towers as more than a mélange of burning paper, glass, concrete, and around 70 carcinogens. It was, instead, a harbinger of something even darker than the nearly 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11 — a long road of death and destruction stretching out into the future, beyond the vanishing point.
Even Bin Laden couldn’t have imagined long-term lethality of his attacks. Close to 9,700 first responders, survivors, and those who helped to clear nearly 1.8 million tons of debris at the World Trade Center have died of illnesses tied to 9/11, according to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. And more than 57,000 first responders and others have been diagnosed with 9/11-linked cancers. Around 155,000 people have enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program, which provides care and health monitoring to people who were exposed to toxic air after 9/11. And an estimated 400,000 people were exposed to toxic contaminants, the risk of physical injury, and physically and emotionally stressful conditions in the days, weeks, and months following the attacks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The vengeful war on the world that bin Laden managed to provoke has proved even more devastating than the effects of the toxic stew we inhaled near Ground Zero. An estimated 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere between 2001 and 2023, alone. Another 3.6 to 3.8 million people are estimated to have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the toll to at least 4.5 million dead and counting. This quarter century of carnage and all that it unleashed has left the U.S. hollowed out and rotting from within; a deterioration in every conceivable measure from economics to democratic ideals to the spiritual health of the nation.
Bin Laden’s bleed-until-bankruptcy plan was designed to sink America’s economy — and it continues to work to great effect. And by ushering in the presidencies of Donald Trump, bin Laden left the United States morally bankrupt, too. Twenty-five years after 9/11, the country is a pale shadow of the superpower that emerged from World War II having been laid low not by the Soviet Union — the nuclear-armed power it long considered an existential threat — but by two trust-fund terrorists: the scions of a Saudi construction empire, and an outer borough New York City real estate developer, respectively.
“The wise man doesn’t squander his security, wealth, and children for the sake of the liar in the White House,” bin Laden said in 2004, referring to Bush. He likely couldn’t have imagined America choosing an even more inveterate liar, an even greater intellectual lightweight, and an even more ruinous president. A quarter century after 9/11, it’s clear that bin Laden won. But the victory was not his alone. And, in the end, his role in it turned out to be vanishingly small. Bush, Cheney, Obama, and Biden, as well as a raft of politicians, government functionaries, and all who went along with the madness unleashed by the attacks, played key roles in helping hobble the U.S. in the 25 years since the September 11. But it’s been Trump, more than anyone else, who has made bin Laden’s lofty 9/11 dreams America’s never-ending nightmare.
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How 41 Senators Could End the Iran War and Rein In Defense Spending
Forty-one is the number of senators needed to stop the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act—a massive bill that sets defense policies and authorities—and push for key modifications.
Sep 11, 2026
In the days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, I joined Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, the Institute for Policy Studies, YES! Magazine, and hundreds of other signatories in calling for “Justice, Not Vengeance.” We argued that the United States should find and prosecute those responsible for 9-11 rather than launch wars against countries that had not attacked us.
We were right to worry: The wars that followed cost trillions of dollars and countless lives, and left the country less secure, not more.
Twenty-five years later, Congress faces a similar test—and a similar warning sign. The United States and Israel are at war with Iran, a war of choice that could prove even more disastrous than the decision to go to war with Afghanistan and Iraq.
While responsibility for the war lies with the Trump administration, Congress has a say in what happens next—if it chooses to act.
When the Senate reconvenes after their recess, they will face the question of approving the NDAA. Senators should use their leverage to change the disastrous direction of this administration’s defense policies.
Likewise, Congress can rein in historic levels of military spending and reject proposals to spend billions of dollars on a new generation of nuclear weapons, funded by taxpayers and historic levels of debt. And it can say no to the rapid development and deployment of AI weapons, an especially important step at a time when AI agents are already going rogue.
All it would take is 41 US senators. That is the number needed to stop the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)—a massive bill that sets defense policies and authorities, with a proposed price tag of $1.5 trillion.
The NDAA passed the US House of Representatives on July 22, but it has stalled in the US Senate.
Under Senate rules, 41 senators can filibuster to stop a bill from moving to the Senate floor for a vote, and the Democratic caucus has 47 senators. So, even in the minority, the Democratic senators—along with any Republicans who oppose “forever wars”—could prevent the NDAA from advancing without modifications.
When the Senate reconvenes after their recess, they will face the question of approving the NDAA. Senators should use their leverage to change the disastrous direction of this administration’s defense policies.
What specifically could 41 Senators do?
- Rein in the spending: Proposed defense spending is at the highest level in real dollars since World War II—a 38% increase over last year’s spending, funded by taxpayers and a national debt that has reached 124% the size of the entire US economy. This spending is unsustainable and unaccountable; the Pentagon just failed its eighth consecutive audit. Congress should restore the inspector general positions the Trump administration eliminated.
- End the war in Iran: Require a War Powers Act resolution, with appropriate guardrails to set the terms for an end to the war. Set limits on the use of taxpayer funds for the conflict.
- Reset our relationship with Israel. Cut military aid to Israel until it withdraws from Gaza, ends the spreading of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and stops threatening its neighbors with unilateral military action. Strip Section 1217 from the Senate version of the NDAA, which would create a US-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative merging research, development, and deployment of military technologies with the Israeli military.
- Work for nuclear safeguards, not new weapons systems: End authorization for a new generation of nuclear weapons that includes the development of intermediate-range systems designed for use in regional conflicts. This risks turning nuclear weapons from a deterrent into a first-strike weapon of aggression. Require robust new arms-control talks aimed at reducing nuclear arsenals; none currently exist since the New START treaty expired on February 5, 2026, leaving the US and Russia with no binding limits on their strategic nuclear arsenals for the first time in decades.
- Stop illegal and ill-advised uses of the US military: Enforce the Posse Comitatus Act's prohibition on using US troops on American soil. End the extrajudicial killings of unidentified people on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, now numbering 227. Prohibit using the military to threaten Canada, Greenland, and other allies as part of efforts to seize their territory.
- Put guardrails on AI-controlled weapons: This field is moving faster than Congress can track, and the NDAA is already the battleground. The House and Senate versions each include provisions on autonomous weapons and human oversight. But the same bill also directs the Pentagon to build a department-wide system for deploying agentic AI at speed and scale, pushing adoption forward even as the human-oversight rules meant to contain it remain unsettled. Congress should preserve and strengthen the human-oversight provisions, not let them get traded away in conference, and should require that no lethal-force decision—including nuclear launch decisions—is ever delegated to an algorithm. Three in four Americans agree: Decisions to kill should be made by people, not machines.
In January of this year, President Donald Trump called for raising the US spending on defense to $1.5 trillion, but has been uncharacteristically quiet about this eye-watering level of defense spending ever since.
Perhaps his silence is because he can see how deeply unpopular the US-Israel war against Iran has turned out to be. Sixty eight percent of Americans say it is not worth the costs, according to a July survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a level of unpopularity that parallels Americans’ views of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And there is no end in sight. In spite of President Trump’s bragging about an imminent US victory in Iran, The Wall Street Journal reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has extended Middle East deployments into 2027.
The US already spends more on the military than any other country—more than twice as much as China and five times as much as Russia. The enormous sums devoted to military spending, and the taxes and debt used to finance them, make the priorities of the American people more difficult to achieve.
Instead of ramping up dangerous conflicts and new weapons systems, we should fund an economy that meets the needs of our families, deploys solutions to the climate crisis, and makes healthcare and housing accessible to everyone. Instead of mounting debt, we should invest in prosperity for future generations.
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After 25 Years, 9/11 Continues to Shape How America Polices Immigration
For a quarter century, America has treated immigration enforcement as a form of counterterrorism. Yet, instead of making us safer, it has given rise to an increasingly militarized agency that, in the name of protecting ‘the homeland,’ uses its vast surveillance network and policing powers to target and kill innocent people.
Sep 11, 2026
Since the start of its second term, the Trump administration has repeatedly defended Immigration and Customs Enforcement shootings and killings, smeared their victims as “domestic terrorists,” racially profiled people with the Supreme Court’s consent, expanded their biometric and social media surveillance capabilities while also maintaining over a dozen “secret and obscure” watchlists. It is effectively dismantling the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, tried—and is trying again—to repeal birthright citizenship, paused all immigrant visa applications, and is aggressively pursuing politically motivated visa revocations and denaturalizations, among other extreme measures.
All of this is reflective of the rampant and unfettered xenophobia, Islamophobia, and white nationalism that define the Trump administration. Yet, at same time, we must also acknowledge that Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s (ICE) violence and Trump’s assault on the immigration system is an extension of the national security framework built following the 9/11 attacks.
ICE was established in March 2003 as part of “the single-largest government reorganization since the creation of the Department of Defense.” A key rationale for including ICE within the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was that the 9/11 hijackers entered the US legally via temporary visas. To keep “the homeland” safe, a more aggressive approach to immigration was thus deemed necessary. As Attorney General John Ashcroft remarked in 2002:
In this new war, our enemy's platoons infiltrate our borders, quietly blending in with visiting tourists, students, and workers. They move unnoticed through our cities, neighborhoods, and public spaces. They wear no uniforms. Their camouflage is not forest green, but rather it is the color of common street clothing. Their tactics rely on evading recognition at the border and escaping detection within the United States. Their terrorist mission is to defeat America, destroy our values, and kill innocent people.
Going forward, immigration enforcement and control agencies would police and surveil every immigrant as if they were potential terrorists. As the Department of Justice (DOJ) emphasized in 2004, “The primary mission of ICE is to prevent acts of terrorism by targeting the people, money, and materials that support terrorists and criminal activities.”
In the name of counterterrorism, the DOJ launched the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) in 2002. Under this program, male foreign nationals aged 16 or older from 25 countries—24 of which were majority-Arab and Muslim (the other was North Korea)—were fingerprinted, interviewed, photographed, and required to check in with immigration officials at regular intervals. These regulations applied to both new arrivals and individuals who were already in the US on temporary visas. NSEERS was suspended in 2011 and finally terminated in 2016 by President Barack Obama—it led to no terrorism prosecutions.
Despite its failure, NSEERS, alongside other measures and decades of Republican fearmongering, functioned to normalize the link between immigration enforcement, border control, and counterterrorism. In doing so, it amplified the alleged danger posed by “radical Islamic terrorism,” thus setting the stage for the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on Muslims. This, in turn, served to distract from the far greater and actual domestic terrorism threat posed by white supremacist groups. As a report by the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs noted, “In 2019, DHS publicly acknowledged white supremacist violence as a major threat to national security for the first time, despite being aware internally of the severity of the threat for 10 years.”
In our desperation to prevent another 9/11, we have spent billions building our own homegrown domestic terrorism threat.
The goal of combating terrorism also promoted a demand for more biometric technologies. As Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) noted in 2001, the reason why “a large group of coordinated terrorists [could] operate for more than a year in the United States without being detected” is because “we could not identify them. We did not know they were here. Only if we can identify terrorists planning attacks on the United States do we have a chance of stopping them. And the biometrics technology, the state-of-the-art technology of today, really offers us a very new way to identify potential terrorists.”
To that end, DHS established the US Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) program in 2003 to collect biometric identifiers from foreign nationals and build an electronic check in-check out system. As Undersecretary for Border and Transportation Security at DHS Asa Hutchinson remarked in 2003, “initially, fingerprints and photographs” will be used; however, “as the technology is perfected, additional forms such as facial recognition or iris scans may be used as well.”
Fast forward two decades and now, ICE agents are currently deploying facial recognition software such as Mobile Fortify. In May 2026, ICE awarded a $25.1 million contract to BI2 Technologies to acquire over 1,500 wireless, handheld iris-scanning devices. In its fiscal year 2027 budget request, DHS allocated $7.5 million to develop face-scanning “smart glasses” that would grant agents real-time access to biometric databases.
Now, importantly, none of this should be taken to mean that the pre-9/11 landscape was entirely welcoming to immigrants. The “browning of America” discourse depicted—and continues to depict—immigrants as an existential threat to the nation. Meanwhile immigration policies like the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996 expanded the number of deportable offenses while also introducing expedited removal processes that allowed immigration officers to deport people without a formal hearing.
And yet, there were a few rays of hope. There was broad support for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, with a Senate hearing scheduled for September 12, 2001. On September 6, 2001, the US and Mexico announced they had reached an agreement on a framework for border and immigration reform that included “respecting the human dignity of all migrants, regardless of their status; recognizing the contribution migrants make to enriching both societies.” At the time, both President George W. Bush and President Vincente Fox “agreed that US-Mexican relations have entered their most promising moment in history.” Then 9/11 happened, and everything changed.
For 25 years, America has treated immigration enforcement as a form of counterterrorism. Yet, instead of making us safer, it has given rise to an increasingly militarized agency that, in the name of protecting “the homeland,” uses its vast surveillance network and policing powers to target and kill innocent people. In our desperation to prevent another 9/11, we have spent billions building our own homegrown domestic terrorism threat.
After 25 years, we must finally recognize that DHS and ICE were never the solution. If we truly wish to make America safer and greater, we must choose to forge a new path—to work toward a world without war, resentment, and violence.
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Victims of Our Post-9/11 Wars Deserve Remembrance, Too
Similarities between Reflecting Absence and an earlier German Holocaust “Counter-Monument” prompt reflections on accepting responsibility.
Sep 11, 2026
Few who pay their respects today in the hallowed plaza where the Twin Towers once stood will be aware that the September 11 memorial echoes a 1987 Holocaust “counter-memorial” in Kassel, Germany. Like our memorial, the German monument consists of a hollow in the shape of what had once been there, into which water flows.
But the scope of the remembrances evoked by the two memorials are revealingly different.
We Americans want only to recall our innocent dead and to honor them. Unlike the Germans, we spurn acknowledging the evils done in their name that came to be intertwined with our losses, the catastrophe we inflicted on an innocent nation, Iraq.
What We Can Learn From Kassel’s Holocaust Counter-Memorial
In 1939, the Nazis destroyed a 40-foot pyramidal fountain in Kassel, Germany because it had been built by a Jew, the entrepreneur Sigmund Aschrott. The elimination of “the Jews’ Fountain” was soon followed by the elimination of Kassel’s 3,000 Jews themselves.
The Aschrott Fountain (1908–1939) is shown.
Forty-five years later it was proposed to rebuild the fountain. But simply rebuilding the original fountain would have erased the memory of its destruction. So artist Horst Hoheisel designed a new fountain: “a mirror image of the old one, sunk beneath the old place in order to rescue the history of this place as a wound and an open question.”
The Memorial to the Aschrottbrunnen Fountain is shown. (Photo by Eistreter, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The September 11 memorial, which is called Reflecting Absence, evokes the missing Twin Towers by revealing their empty foundations. Hoheisel’s earlier Kassel counter-monument is, similarly, an emptiness in the shape of the missing original. “The pyramid will be turned into a funnel into whose darkness water runs down,” Hoheisel says.
“The sunken fountain is an invitation to passersby who stand upon it to search for the memorial in their own heads. For only there is the memorial to be found.”
The underground portion of the Aschrottbrunnen Fountain is shown. (Photo by Horst Hoheisel)
Kassel’s Holocaust memorial is one of many throughout Germany, part of the way the Germans have accepted responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era. This small, local memorial compels us to think of those who were murdered, but also of those who murdered and those who stood by.
The installation of the Aschrottbrunnen Fountain is shown. (Photo by Horst Hoheisel)
We reflect on the small viciousness of destroying “the Jew’s fountain,” and the monstrous barbarity to which this was prelude. The small monument conjures the sadness of loss, and the responsibility of a people for acts that can never be made right.
Can America Accept Responsibility for the Mass Deaths Inflicted in the Name of Our “War on Terrorism”
The murder of thousands of Americans, the crime of September 11, 2001, spawned a larger tragedy for another people. Using the false suggestion of Iraq complicity as one of its pretexts, and treating the 9/11 “war on terrorism” as license for war on Baghdad as well as on Kabul, our government invaded Iraq, overthrew its government, and occupied the country.
In reality, as Bush White House anti-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke confirmed, Iraq was not responsible for 9/11 and our government knew it. “In the weeks immediately after 9/11,” Clarke explained, “the president… instruct[ed] the Pentagon to prepare for the invasion of Iraq... Even though they knew at the time from me, from the FBI, from the CIA, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.”
Knowing that Iraq had nothing to do with the al Qaeda attack did not matter because President George W. Bush’s government had begun targeting Iraq for invasion long before September 11. The very first meeting of Bush’s national security team on January 20, 2001 included a discussion of “military options” for Iraq and overthrowing its government.
It would represent no insult to the memory of the innocents murdered in America, 25 Septembers ago, were we to acknowledge and memorialize the carnage and catastrophe we unleashed in Iraq.
As a delegation from our British allies secretly reported to their government before the invasion, “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the [Bush] policy” of going to war. “The case [for war] was thin.”
The American invasion, and the resistance and chaotic civil war triggered by the US occupation, likely took between 500,000 and 1 million Iraqi lives. It made refugees of millions more, and inflicted malnutrition, birth defects, and other health disasters on a generation of Iraqi children.
It would represent no insult to the memory of the innocents murdered in America, 25 Septembers ago, were we to acknowledge and memorialize the carnage and catastrophe we unleashed in Iraq.
To America’s 9/11 memorial we should add a wall on which we engrave, in a necessarily small font, the names of however many can be identified of the million Iraqi men, women, and children slain in the wars and sectarian strife our invasion precipitated. And since President Donald Trump has ensnared our nation in another pointless war, another war of aggression based on the excuse of “terrorism,” a Middle East war he has no plan to end, we should inscribe as well the names of the Iranian civilians killed in Trump’s war. The 100 children slain at the beginning of the bombing campaign. The wedding guests bombed in a small Iran town last week. They deserve remembrance, too.
Of course, this is unthinkable and will never happen.
It would be “too political” to acknowledge any connection between the horrors we suffered and the horrors we inflicted. In fact, even the suggestion will be said to “disrespect” our honored dead—as though their memories could be further sullied than they already have been by the evil perpetrated in their names.
Nonetheless, the proposal may be useful. As Hoheisel says: “That’s how a counter-monument works. People get angry, they write letters, but you have a discussion. Out of this void, the history begins to come out.” In America, such a provocation may be the only kind of counter-monument that is permitted.
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Opening the Book of Life on the Day the Towers Fell
The convergence of September 11 and Rosh Hashanah is an opportunity to look back at what we did and did not do in the aftermath.
Sep 11, 2026
I am such a caricature of a native New Yorker that my first date, at age of 12, was at the observation deck of the World Trade Center. I thought there was nothing more romantic than showing someone a full view of the place that was simultaneously my shtetl and the greatest city in the world. I said a shechechiyanu when we walked up to the glass, because the beauty of the moment called for a blessing.
Years later I was a freshman in college in September of 2001, and when I came home for a long weekend that October, the air across Manhattan still smelled unholy, like burning wires, melted concrete, and mass organic decay. There were an unspeakable number of lives, whole universes unto themselves, lost that day, and their memories being a blessing remains a cold comfort. For many of us in the aftermath of that terrible day, we watched the national conversation shift to be entirely about who we should be afraid of—and too often, the answer was some of our fellow Americans.
This year, Rosh Hashanah begins on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The convergence is an opportunity and a gift. Together, Jews in New York and around the country will experience several hours of extraordinary potency: one part of our hearts focused on the opening of the book of life, and the other on the day the towers fell, and everything that came after.
This is an opportunity to understand what Jewish tradition offers us, as well as what it demands.
The legal frameworks this regime is currently using to terrorize immigrant communities were born in the fall of 2001 in New York City. And just like 25 years ago, these attempts to terrorize and target immigrant communities rely on fear.
Judaism teaches us that there is no pathway to atonement with God until you have first atoned with the people you harmed; the gateway to divine repair is closed until interpersonal repair is complete. Crucially, Jewish theology holds it as an impossibility rather than a preference: You cannot approach God while your neighbor still bears the wound you gave them.
There is no such thing as atonement without honest accounting. There is no repair without looking the harm in the eye.
This is the fundamental spiritual nature of the High Holidays. The convergence of September 11 and Rosh Hashanah is an opportunity to look back at what we did in the aftermath. But we must also simultaneously account for the acute political crisis unfolding around us. The multiracial democracy that has kept Jews safer in this country than anywhere else in the history of the world is under attack.
A legal fact that must be part of our accounting: It was in the increased pressure to target American Muslim and American Arab communities that Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) was formed post-9/11. There is a direct line from that targeting in the early 2000s to ICE’s attacks these past years in places like Portland, Washington, DC and Minneapolis. Immigrants have been terrorized—surveilled and made to fear their own government when leaving their homes. Immigrants and innocent bystanders alike have been shot and killed, and families have yet again lost loved ones to both violence and detention. The legal frameworks this regime is currently using to terrorize immigrant communities were born in the fall of 2001 in New York City. And just like 25 years ago, these attempts to terrorize and target immigrant communities rely on fear.
Twenty-five years ago we decided it was an acceptable trade-off for our safety to treat Muslim- and Arab-American men as suspects first and neighbors second. Indefinite detention, the erosion of due process, and the normalization of disappearing people were tested on them. Now, twenty-five years later, we are watching those same frameworks on steroids
If Jews, of all people, cannot recognize the peril here, then we are truly lost.
To be clear, some Jews spoke up in the fall of 2001. They joined the Jewish prophetic tradition of decrying injustice and protested the attack on civil liberties for Muslim- and Arab Americans. But most of us did not.
As Jews, we understand what it means to feel afraid. Antisemitism is a real threat to our safety, bigotry that manifests as real violence—in our places of worship, our neighborhoods, and in halls of power. Our immigrant neighbors, our American Muslim and American Arab neighbors, are not our enemy and we must not be silent when they are targeted in the name of our safety as Jews or Americans.
Those in power right now who are using their power to target so-called outsiders need our support to enact their agenda—to create a country only of people who look and think exactly like them. An agenda where white Christian nationalism is the norm, and where it’s become acceptable to use violence and force to keep the rest of us in line.
This is where our tradition meets us with exquisite moral clarity. Where we must account for what we did—or in this case did not—do. The Talmud teaches that someone who can protest the wrongs of their household, their city, their country, their world and does not is held responsible for those wrongs. English unhelpfully softens the words that matter here. What we translate as "protest"—limchot—really means rebuke or forceful confrontation; the Talmud is not asking for polite dissent. And what we translate as "held responsible"—nitpas—comes from a root meaning to physically grab, to catch, to seize. The sin snags you. It wraps itself around you until the injustice is indisputably as much yours as anyone else's.
This is the warning, and this is the theology of the season. We cannot atone for what we refuse to name. You cannot get right with God while you are still refusing to get right with your neighbor. And you cannot get right with your neighbor while you are still pretending you did not participate in the harm.
We must not treat the 25th anniversary of September 11 and the beginning of Rosh Hashanah as separate events. Instead, we should welcome this invitation to stand in our fear, and our pain, and our integrity, and face what we did. Only then can we truly move into a different world. Our spiritual health and the health of our democracy are both depending on it.
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9/11 Began a US Reign of Terror in the Middle East—Now It's Come Home
The so-called “War on Terror” has revealed itself to be a war OF terror, one that is being waged by our own government on foreign soil as well as here in the United States.
Sep 11, 2026
On September 11, 2001, the world watched as the World Trade Center, the twin towers that represented US global dominance, were struck by hijacked US commercial jetliners and came crashing to the ground. Nearly 3,000 people were killed, from high-powered executive to clerical workers and immigrant kitchen workers. The hijackers were Middle Eastern men, primarily from Saudi Arabia.
Twenty-five years later, many questions remain about how the US military and security establishment could have allowed this to happen. Hardly anybody believes the official 9/11 story, which raises more questions than it answers, and there are many competing theories about who was behind this tragedy. Was this an incredible US security lapse or a highly coordinated false flag? Whatever the case, the neocons in George W. Bush’s administration immediately declared a “war on terrorism,” and put into motion their longstanding designs to conquer seven Muslim countries in the Middle East (as revealed by General Wesley Clark)—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. Over the last 25 years, the US has initiated wars against all of these countries, as well as Afghanistan.
US administrations under Presidents George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump (again) are responsible for creating a hell on Earth throughout the Middle East, resulting in millions of deaths and millions more homeless refugees. Thousands of US soldiers also died in Iraq and Afghanistan, any thousands more carry the physical, mental, and spiritual wounds to this day.
These nations may never fully recover, but Iran still stands. It may be the only Middle Eastern country still strong enough to resist domination by Israel, the US, and the former European colonial powers. That is why it is being frantically targeted by militarists in Israel and the US And that is why the US peace movement must do all we can to end the escalating US on Iran.
Who Are the Real Terrorists?
Under the slogan of “the war on terror,” the US government has carried out an increasing campaign of terror worldwide and against its own people. Torture has been normalized as represented by the extralegal Guantánamo torture prison on occupied Cuban land. The US and NATO provoked Russia into a catastrophic war in Ukraine which they continue to fuel with billions of dollars, arms, and military advisers. Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses have enabled an ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. In January of this year, the US made a brazen attack on Venezuela, kidnapped its president and first lady, and are holding the Venezuelan government hostage while they steal Venezuelan oil. The US has blocked all oil shipments to Cuba, greatly exacerbating the damage done by the 64-year-old US blockade of Cuba, even as they threaten to invade. President Trump and “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth post “snuff videos” of their blatantly illegal bombing of boats in South American waters, where they have murdered hundreds of fisherman and alleged “narco-terrorists” without any evidence or judicial proceeding.
Trump’s War of Terror Comes Home
The stepped-up US aggression abroad is now being mirrored by state-sponsored terror in these United States. Armed gangs of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents routinely carry out racist attacks on immigrant communities and people of color, no matter their immigration or citizenship status. The mass incarceration of Black men is now matched by mass incarceration of brown men, women, and children in for-profit prisons, where abusive conditions have led to many deaths. White supremacism is out in the open as cruel fascist practices are being normalized. US peace activists and immigrant rights activists are being labeled as terrorists and prosecuted as terrorists for nonviolent resistance to the terror of the state.
Even as the US war on Iran continues and escalates, the Trump administration and Republican Party are openly seeking to undermine the midterm US elections by blatant last-minute gerrymandering of congressional districts, by trying to prevent mail-in voting, by reducing the number of polling places, by threatening to deploy intimidating ICE agents at polling places and even “joking” about canceling the elections altogether. Veterans For Peace has joined with other veterans’ groups and military families in the Veteran Against Fascism coalition to do all we can to defend the elections, for example by providing safe accompaniment to the polls.
The Terror of Nuclear War
Adding to the atmosphere of global terror is the ever-growing threat of nuclear war. Multiple sources have confirmed that the Trump administration has been discussing the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons in its war on Iran. Pentagon war-gaming of the US use of tactical nuclear weapons has consistently resulted in global nuclear war that leads to a nuclear winter in which billions of people would starve to death—those that survived the initial nuclear blasts and radiation illnesses. Seventy-five countries have ratified the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which outlaws possessing sharing, transporting, using, or threatening to use nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, the Trump administration has ditched the last remaining nuclear arms treaty with Russia, while it carries out a series of wars that—if not checked—will inevitably lead to nuclear war. In fact, the US is actively planning to wage a war against China that would start with a US nuclear first strike on China. These policies only lead more countries to seek nuclear weapons, directly the opposite of the stated US policy and treaty obligations to seek nuclear non-proliferation and good-faith negotiations to eliminate all nuclear weapons.
The so-called “War on Terror” has revealed itself to be a war OF terror, one that is being waged by our own government on foreign soil as well as here in the United States. On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we must rededicate ourselves to resisting US wars at home and abroad.
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The Time Has Come for a 'Right' to Clean Water
Green Amendments rely upon the highest legal authorities we have in the US–our state and federal constitutions–and use their placement within the Bill of Rights to make environmental rights an unquestionable, enforceable legal entitlement for everyone.
Sep 10, 2026
Sometimes defeat can be clarifying.
Last week, the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit against the City of Jackson, Mississippi, in which the plaintiffs alleged that city officials knowingly allowed residents to drink water that was unsafe, tainted with lead and dangerous microbes.
The facts are not in dispute. “The City’s public-water system is fraught with vexing shortcomings,” the court found. “In recent years, it produced water containing lead, E. Coli, and other bacteria, allegedly violated the Safe Drinking Water Act and EPA regulations, shut down and left residents without water for weeks, and necessitated the issuance of dozens of boil-water notices.”
Despite this, the court ruled that the lawsuit could not move forward. The problem for the plaintiffs, as the court found, was that these harms do not rise to the level of constitutional harm. “These deprivations, while grievous,” the court wrote, “do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.” And so the court rejected their arguments.
Green Amendments legally elevate our rights to a clean, safe, healthy, and quality environment to the same level as our rights to speech, religion, and a free press.
What are we to make of a situation where a city can neglect its responsibilities, knowingly expose its residents to dangerous and life-altering contamination, and get away with it because, in the eyes of our legal system, “mismanagement of the public-water system resulting in Plaintiffs’ lead exposure is wholly different” from “sexual assault by a police officer,” “forced surgical examination,” “forced stomach pumping for evidence,” “and medicating prisoners against their will”?
Is it truly all that different? Just because the law excuses it, should we truly accept injustices that contaminate our bodies, make us sick, and cause lifelong learning disabilities in children?
We don’t have to–there is another option. We regroup. We reorganize. And we fight back. And in this case, we have a solution.
“It is undisputed that the [US] Constitution does not guarantee clean water,” the court wrote. That’s true. But it's not the whole story.
In Mississippi and in most states across our nation there is no constitutional right to clean water. But in three states, with dozens more on the same path, there is.
In Pennsylvania, the Commonwealth’s Constitution guarantees the “right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic, and esthetic values of the environment.” It adds: “Pennsylvania's public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come,” and requires all government officials–both state and local–to conserve and maintain the state's natural resources for the benefit of the people.
The State Constitution of Montana recognizes the inalienable right “to a clean and healthful environment and the rights of pursuing life’s basic necessities.”
And New York’s constitution declares, “Each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.”
It’s called a Green Amendment, and it is explicitly designed to protect people from harm like that suffered by the residents of Jackson, Mississippi.
Green Amendments are self-executing provisions added to a state constitution’s Bill of Rights or Declaration of Rights that recognize, protect, and guarantee the inalienable rights of all people to an environment of quality, including pure water, clean air, a safe climate, and healthy environments.
Green Amendments legally elevate our rights to a clean, safe, healthy, and quality environment to the same level as our rights to speech, religion, and a free press. Green Amendments are clear in their protections, deriving their strength from plain and clear language, proven legal theories, and robust constitutional court precedent.
In short, Green Amendments rely upon the highest legal authorities we have in the US–our state and federal constitutions–and use their placement within the Bill of Rights to make environmental rights an unquestionable, enforceable legal entitlement for everyone.
When our rights to free speech or religion, to a free press or freedom of assembly are infringed upon by government action, we do not sit idly by and accept it. We rise up and demand our rights be protected, secure in the knowledge that we are backed by the clear and powerful language of our constitutions. Why should our right to pure water, clean air, or a healthy environment be any different? With Green Amendments they do not have to be.
Today pollution and environmental desecration are seen as entitlements of powerful industrial and political interests. Recall that in Sterling v. City of Jackson the court agreed that the city was poisoning its residents–but wouldn’t let the plaintiffs sue to rectify it with a remedy that protected all city residents from harm. Instead the court suggested that pursuit of tort claims, likely resulting in money damages for those who could document harm from the contaminated water, was good enough. That’s just the way it is, the court shrugged.
With Green Amendments, we transform this expectation. Our entitlement to a clean, safe, and healthy environment becomes the baseline government must responsibly protect.
Environmental issues are all around us these days: rising carbon emissions driving ever-hotter summers; PFAS, lead, mercury, and other toxic chemicals leaching into our drinking water; the hyperscaling of data centers slurping up ever growing amounts of land, water, and power.
With Green Amendments we may not always win when we experience environmental injustice, but they give us the constitutional ability to say, “No,” to push back, and to fight for our rights.
A Mississippi Green Amendment could have meant a very different outcome for communities living in the City of Jackson.
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Medicare For All May Not Be as Far Away as You Fear
The pessimistic view that we are moving in the wrong direction sees only the waves at the surface. It misses the subterranean tremors underneath. If we fight, we can win.
Sep 10, 2026
Editor’s Note: The following is the third excerpt from Nancy J. Altman’s latest book, The Road to Medicare for All: A Call to Action (Routledge, 2026), now available for purchase wherever quality books are sold. Read the first and second excerpts published by Common Dreams here and here. As the United States continues to spend substantially more on health care than other wealthy nations but with poorer health outcomes, Altman’s book analyzes the dysfunction of the current system and sets forth the solution. “Medicare for All won’t happen without a fight,” she argues, “but it is a fight we can win.”
As policy-wise and popular as Improved Medicare for All is, the nation may appear to be as far away from enacting Improved Medicare for All as possible. During his first term, Trump did what he could to accelerate the privatization of Medicare. Unfortunately, his thumb on the scale in favor of privatized Medicare is not only back, but is on steroids.
Adding to the sense that the nation may be as far away from Improved Medicare for All as possible, the Republicans enacted legislation that is projected to cause 15 million people to lose their health insurance. Adding to the sense that we are nowhere near enacting Improved Medicare for All, the two prior presidential elections, in 2016 and 2020, saw Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), two leading champions of Medicare for All, lose in the primary to the more centrist candidate Hillary Clinton, in 2016, and Joe Biden, in 2020. Trump defeated Clinton and won a second term in 2024 against Vice President Kamala Harris. Though Harris did not mention the fact in her presidential campaign, she was an original cosponsor of the Sanders-authored Medicare for All Act.
Trump’s election to a second term, the Republican control of Congress (as these words are written), and a Supreme Court with two-thirds of the justices who are acting as Trump advocates rather than independent jurists appear to suggest that the nation is moving away from national health insurance. But it is crucial to recognize that today is only a snapshot in time. The pessimistic view that we are moving in the wrong direction sees only the waves at the surface. It misses the subterranean tremors underneath. The Republican cuts to health insurance are already putting a strain on rural and inner-city hospitals, as well as nursing homes. The nation is seeing hospitals close as a result of the enactment. Their closure, in turn, strains even those hospitals and nursing homes not directly affected by the cuts.
Improved Medicare for All won’t magically become a reality. It will take all of us who support it to fight for it, in small and large ways.
With the cost of health care rising and, with it, increased insecurity, a majority of the electorate are concluding that the nation is moving in the wrong direction. Perhaps even more significantly, it will become clearer and clearer that the current path is unsustainable.
Importantly, two action-forcing events requiring Congressional legislation are on the horizon. Social Security and Medicare Part A, by law, can only pay benefits if they have sufficient dedicated revenue to cover their costs. To avoid an automatic across-the-board reduction of around 20 percent of the monthly Social Security benefits received by more than 70 million beneficiaries, and to avoid hospitals no longer being reimbursed, Congress must act. However the precise dates shift over the next few years, Congress unquestionably will have to act in the next half decade or so, before the revenue is insufficient to continue to pay full benefits.
Those action-forcing events provide an opportunity. Because those action-forcing events will result in must-pass legislation, provisions that expand Medicare, as well as Social Security, could be included. To make that a reality, though, it is essential that those who support Improved Medicare for All are fully prepared.
Improved Medicare for All won’t magically become a reality. It will take all of us who support it to fight for it, in small and large ways. The wonderful news is that determined activists are currently working hard to make Improved Medicare for All the law of the land. Building a winning coalition and other steps are already underway.
It is imperative that a winning coalition is built strong enough to defeat those who will fight against Improved Medicare for All. Physicians have been extremely active politically since the United States first started to seriously debate universal health insurance at the start of the twentieth century. Initially, the American Medical Association, whose members in 1910 comprised more than half the doctors in the nation, endorsed the legislation under consideration. Individual doctors, however, strenuously objected and made those objections known through their state medical societies. As a result, in 1920, the AMA’s House of Delegates formally voted to reverse its support, and instead opposed the initiatives.
While the AMA has been a staunch opponent ever since, that may be changing. Though the AMA has opposed national health insurance for over a century, doctors have much to gain from it. The image of the self-employed family doctor who makes house calls is virtually an anachronistic image. Today, around four out of five physicians – 77.6 percent – work for corporations. Historically, doctors have expressed concern over government oversight and interference. More and more, though, physicians’ reality is that they now live under commercial insurance oversight and interference. Unlike elected officials for whom Americans vote and whose salaries are set and paid transparently from public funds, doctors have no say over who runs private insurance companies and how they are operated.
A survey of doctors conducted by the Chicago Medical Society found that 66.8 percent had favorable views of a single-payer system.
The doctors most active in support of Improved Medicare for All are the leaders and 25,000 members of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP). They have provided a clear and steady voice on the issue since their founding in 1987. In part because of PNHP’s sustained effort, doctors seem to be moving toward support for Improved Medicare for All. A survey of doctors conducted by the Chicago Medical Society found that 66.8 percent had favorable views of a single-payer system. In fact, when asked to choose between Medicare for All and an improved Affordable Care Act (colloquially known as Obamacare), the doctors chose Medicare for All by two to one!
The increasing support among doctors for Improved Medicare for All is likely in large part a response to how vexing and inadequate the current system is for all participants, including doctors. The increasing support for Improved Medicare for All may also reflect a more diversified pool of physicians. When Medicare was enacted in 1965, doctors were overwhelmingly white men, who tended to identify as Republicans. Accordingly, the AMA gave the majority of its campaign contributions to Republican candidates. Ninety-four percent of the medical students at that time were men. Only 2.5 percent of practicing physicians were African-American, generally having been trained in segregated settings. An even tinier 0.2 percent of medical students were Hispanic or indigenous at that time.
In contrast, women comprised 55.1 percent of the entering classes in accredited medical schools across the country for academic year 2024-25. That was the sixth year in a row that women made up the majority of medical school students. They comprised 54.9 percent of total enrollment. African-Americans comprised 10.3 percent of total enrollment, and Hispanics, 12.3 percent. In 2021, more than one out of four surgeons and other physicians – 26.5 percent – were foreign-born.
Led by PNHP, advocates of Improved Medicare for All must have a focused strategy geared toward physicians to solidify the support of doctors, with the goal of converting the AMA from a force in opposition to a force in support. With a focus on improving the quality of medical practice while compensating its providers adequately, along with improving Medicare and extending it to everyone, the goal for supporters of Improved Medicare for All should be to convince doctors to become a force for its enactment.
Physicians have been perhaps the hardest opponent to overcome in the past, because of the extremely close relationship they have had historically with their patients, who rely on their doctors when their lives are literally on the line. When doctors give patients advice, those words carry enormous weight, even if the advice is about whether universal health insurance would lead to better or worse health care. If physicians tell their patients the proposed legislation will harm their practice and therefore their patients’ health care, that is influential.
While attaining the support of the AMA can likely be achieved with concerted effort particularly and primarily by physicians themselves and would be extremely valuable, that support is not essential. After all, Medicare was enacted despite the AMA’s strong opposition. Moreover, while doctors historically have been extremely influential with their patients about health policy, and they remain so, the need to change doctors because they are no longer in-network and the increasing reliance on teams of healthcare providers, including nurses, nurse practitioners, and physicians’ assistants, have increased the influence of nonphysician providers.
Nurses are another key group, and fortunately they have been leading the fight for Improved Medicare for All. Unlike the AMA, National Nurses United (NNU), the largest professional association of registered nurses, with 225,000 members nationwide, has been advocating for Improved Medicare for All for decades, with determination and effectiveness.
Following the lead of the AMA, the American Hospital Association (AHA), which represents nearly 5,000 hospitals, has opposed the last century of efforts to enact national health insurance. Improved Medicare for All, with its guaranteed payments to providers, its ability to incentivize healthcare providers to practice where the need is highest, and its ability to use tax dollars to subsidize the most at-risk hospitals, is a solution. Though the AHA does not yet support Improved Medicare for All, advocates may be able to persuade individual hospital administrators and, over time, the AHA itself to recognize the advantages of Improved Medicare for All and join the effort.
Another powerful group that started as supportive in the early years but then quickly switched were employers, who worried about the cost to them and the potential government interference in what they considered their independent authority. Though they still oppose it today, they might be persuaded of its value to them because healthcare costs have grown so substantially, and the lack of universal national health insurance puts them at a competitive disadvantage to their foreign counterparts.
Most companies are primarily focused on the cost of health care and, therefore, should be open to Improved Medicare for All, if they are convinced it would reduce their costs. There are some industries, though, that have an overwhelmingly strong stake in the current inefficient, costly system. Pharmaceutical manufacturers, pharmacists, and their associations have been aggressive parts of the opposition from the beginning. Another opponent has been the insurance industry. Neither pharmaceutical companies nor health insurance companies are likely to be convinced to end their opposition to Improved Medicare for All. Pharmaceutical companies take advantage of the bloated system to make extraordinary profits. Under Improved Medicare for All, the pharmaceutical industry will still make profits. Price gouging, however, will stop. Similarly, health insurance companies, for which Improved Medicare for All is an existential threat, will fight as hard as possible.
Health care is a matter of life and death for virtually all of us at some point in our lives.
Those monied interests must be defeated – no easy task given their vast resources. As powerful as they are, history shows that they can be beaten. They can be defeated, if the electorate is engaged and determined. The way to defeat those stakeholders that cannot be convinced of the benefits of Improved Medicare for All is with ongoing motivated action at both the grassroots and grasstops levels. The strong antipathy to commercial health insurance, exposed by the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, reveals that the public may be ready to fight persistently, relentlessly, and effectively for accessible, affordable, high-quality health care for all.
History reveals that Americans’ support for national health insurance is generally widespread and strong at the start of the public push, likely because the need is so great, but that support can easily be shaken. Polling shows that support for Improved Medicare for All is susceptible to opposition messaging that invokes fear of loss and danger. That is not surprising, because health care is a matter of life and death for virtually all of us at some point in our lives. The challenge will be to keep people motivated and not swayed by half-truths and lies, which history demonstrates opponents are willing to deploy. The uber-wealthy want to defeat anything that will increase their costs and reduce their wealth, even by a little. They will seek to scare the American people to retain the status quo. Obviously, fear of failing to obtain adequate health care when needed is an extremely powerful fear that can be exploited.
A key player in maintaining the active support of the American people is organized labor. Studies show that union members are more likely to vote, to volunteer for candidates, and to be influenced by their union leadership in political matters generally. Importantly, they remain a counterweight to the corrosive power of self-interested billionaires and multinational corporations. While organized labor can be counted on, it does have concerns that should be addressed. These include the fact that in negotiating for the generous healthcare plans their members enjoy, they had to trade away current compensation. Moreover, some workers involved in the administration of the current wasteful system will lose employment as a result of the greater efficiency of Improved Medicare for All. Both of those concerns should be addressed as part of the fight for Improved Medicare for All. Both issues are discussed in greater detail in the next chapter, which focuses on the counterattack.
A crucial part to winning the fight for Improved Medicare for All is extremely careful messaging to strengthen the commitment and effort of supporters and to win over those who may be skeptical.
As part of the effort to enact Improved Medicare for All, advocates must be an active part of the fight for workers’ rights to unionize and build union strength. In addition, advocates must employ a careful strategy, in addition to relying on unions, to convince the American people to fight for Improved Medicare for All.
Using the right messaging is key. While the majority of Americans favor Improved Medicare for All, polling indicates that the support can be shaken simply by the way the issue is framed. For example, while 63 percent have a positive reaction to the phrases “Medicare for all,” and “Universal health coverage,” that reaction drops to 49 percent when the phrase is “Single-payer health insurance system,” and 43 percent when the proposal is called “Socialized medicine.” People’s opinions can change dramatically depending on what is emphasized. When those polled are told that Medicare for All will increase their taxes, support drops to just 37 percent. When, though, they are told there will be no premiums and out-of-pocket costs will be reduced, support increases to 67 percent. Indeed, when those polled are told that the proposal guarantees health care as a right for all, support jumps to 71 percent.
This means that a crucial part to winning the fight for Improved Medicare for All is extremely careful messaging to strengthen the commitment and effort of supporters and to win over those who may be skeptical. While the facts are important and strongly on the side of advocates of Improved Medicare for All, history teaches that winning must include effective messaging that is repeated frequently.
Careful strategizing and messaging are especially crucial with respect to older Americans who are Medicare beneficiaries or are about to become so. Seniors have, on average, the greatest need for health care and are the most reliable voters. History shows that they generally pay keen attention to conversations about retirement security and health care. Older Americans were key to the enactment of Social Security in 1935 and its improvements ever since. They were also key to the enactment of Medicare in 1965. History also reveals, though, that the deployment of fear tactics targeted toward seniors can be effective, unfortunately. Consequently, it is vital that proponents of national health insurance have a systematic strategy with respect to seniors, including careful messaging.
In particular, the name Medicare for All may be a two-edged sword. The name presumably tests so well because Medicare, having completed its 61st year, is widely known and understood. Virtually all Americans know people who currently are covered by Medicare and appropriately expect to be covered themselves one day, if they aren’t currently. Consequently, it is harder to demonize as something scary, foreign, and potentially dangerous.
As important as the enactment of Medicare was, both in its own right and as a first big step toward Improved Medicare for All, its creation established a part of the population that might believe that they have something to lose by its expansion to others. Opponents can and have played on the fear that expanding Medicare to the entire population will dilute it and endanger it. For this reason, it may be prudent to always call the proposal, as this book does, Improved Medicare for All.
Starting with the word, “improved” subtly emphasizes that it will benefit those currently on Medicare. The improvements make the proposal a winner for current beneficiaries. It will eliminate all of their out-of-pocket costs. Its long-term care coverage will be a lifesaver for one out of every three seniors and their families. That coverage of long-term care will end the need for seniors to spend all of their assets to qualify for Medicaid and the care they need. Instead, it will allow seniors to pass on whatever savings they have accumulated to their children and grandchildren. Moreover, simply the knowledge of that coverage will provide everyone with greater peace of mind.
For those who today have traditional Medicare, Improved Medicare for All will provide them with hearing, vision, and dental services. And it will free everyone from the complicated sign-up process that current Medicare enrollees must wade through for prescription drug coverage, Medigap coverage, and, for increasing numbers, the erroneously-named Medicare Advantage. In that regard, though, supporters must have a strategy for those who are enrolled in Medicare Advantage. The ending of Medicare Advantage is particularly challenging to message, because it is extremely popular at least until people get seriously ill, when its extra benefits are of less concern and its narrow network of providers and deny/delay tactics are life-threatening. How to message Medicare Advantage, as well as messaging more generally to seniors, is dealt with in greater detail in the next chapter. The basic point, though, is that messaging specifically aimed at reassuring and enlisting seniors must be a key part of a winning strategy.
Fundamentally, advocates must be astute about employing the most effective messaging. The issue should be constantly polled and the messaging refined, as part of an overarching strategy and game plan. The bottom line, though, is that a winning strategy must include careful messaging that is snappy and compelling, but brief. The messaging must be used repeatedly, consistently, and widely.
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You Can Fight Trump's Voter Suppression Efforts With One Simple Action: Voting
The effort to undermine the election is failing. It will succeed only if citizens stay home.
Sep 10, 2026
Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Never trouble trouble until trouble troubles you.” That’s not quite our approach at the Brennan Center. We worry. (Dr. Franklin also advised, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”)
What are we particularly concerned about as we look toward November?
Voter confusion is perhaps the biggest risk. People ask, understandably, can they still vote by mail? Will I need to show a passport or birth certificate to register? It has been many years since the freedom to vote has faced so many proposed challenges, and never before from the federal government. With all the news and noise, citizens cannot be expected to follow the executive edicts and ping-ponging court rulings in minute detail.
In fact, for voters, very little has actually changed. Congress and courts blocked all those bad ideas. The SAVE Act never passed. As a general matter, citizens can cast ballots as before.
After all the push and pull, voters can make their voices heard. Make a plan to vote. Vote early if possible. In person, with a drop box, or if necessary, using the mail.
With less than two months to go, President Donald Trump’s drive to undermine the election is failing. Judges, states and counties, and voting rights groups have blocked his moves. If we keep at it, we can have free and fair elections in 2026.
What else keeps us on edge? The Supreme Court, of course. It is now considering whether to undo a trial court’s decision blocking a rule that would allow the US Postal Service to withhold mail ballots. The trial court determined that rule is illegal and unconstitutional.
If the court allows the USPS to implement its rule, it would introduce chaos and disenfranchise many voters just before the election, as a USPS whistleblower explained in a friend-of-the-court brief detailing the agency’s rushed and flawed process to implement the rule. The court will likely rule in a matter of days on the administration’s request to allow the USPS rule. Fingers crossed.
Here’s a third concern: a growing risk of foreign interference. America is at war. (An illegal, unauthorized war, worth noting.) In 1980, the “October surprise” was the notion that Iran would release Americans it held hostage to influence that year’s election. Let’s hope that Iranian hackers do not produce a digital “October surprise” this year.
Iran has shown its ability to break into municipal water systems in Minnesota. In previous elections, Russia and China have tried to sway voters or attack registration lists. Trump’s purge of election security offices means that American elections have less federal protection against malevolent foreign hackers than before.
States have worked hard to get ready. And it’s important to remember that there is no way for even the most sophisticated schemer to change the results. Voting machines are not connected to the internet. And citizens cast ballots with a paper record, which can be audited and recounted.
Some of our worries are decreasing.
First, “ICE at the polls.” That could still happen. But deployment of federal forces is illegal under numerous federal and state laws. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff pledged recently not to use federal troops, correctly asserting, “Election administration and security remain the fundamental responsibility of state and local officials.” We have growing confidence that courts would step in fast. At the Brennan Center, we are prepared to sue if necessary. The briefs are written, and the toner is in the printer.
Then there are the Justice Department observers deployed to some states. They are annoying and often seem like a bit of a mess. But they too are subject to the laws that prohibit voter intimidation, and state officials are prepared to speak up if observers are disruptive.
And as for the worry that electoral winners won’t be certified, we are increasingly confident that courts will step in here, too. Judges have been heroes and upheld the rule of law.
But courts are not enough. We need a citizen mobilization to watch polls, help voters, and blow the whistle on abuse. That, too, gives hope.
It’s going to be a busy two months. No doubt Trump and his partisans will fling new charges every few days. All that clatter can confuse voters further. Perhaps that’s part of the goal.
So for all of us who want voters to have their say in 2026, a chief job is to stay calm and make clear that—as of right now, at least—little has changed. That’s a task for the news media. Public officials should be clear and calm. We who fight for voting rights must measure our own tone, so as not to rattle confidence.
After all the push and pull, voters can make their voices heard. Make a plan to vote. Vote early if possible. In person, with a drop box, or if necessary, using the mail. As we’ve said before, the effort to undermine the election is failing. It will succeed only if citizens stay home.
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Donald Trump Is Laughing All the Way to the Bank... at the End of the World
By embracing fossil fuels and shutting down renewable energy, “our” president is making a fortune off end-of-the-world policies. Think of him, in fact, not figuratively, but all too literally, as the president from hell.
Sep 10, 2026
Honestly, I don’t think we really get it yet.
Let’s face it. It’s going to be hot, hot, hot. Or do I mean hotter, hotter, hotter, or even hottest, hottest, hottest, or someday, for all we know, beyond any words we might now have to describe it.
Though it seldom seems that way in the daily news, we’re talking about a genuinely apocalyptic possibility. Give us human beings full credit. Somehow, we’ve managed to come up with not one but two distinctly apocalyptic ways to potentially destroy ourselves and this planet—one a relatively speedy way to go and the other already operating in world-destroying slow motion—and that, believe me, is no small thing.
Here are just a few examples of that slow-motion version of our self-destruction on this increasingly extreme planet of... well, can I really say “ours” anymore, or should I say theirs?
The Don is indeed an atomic bomb or at least a climate bomb of a president his second time around.
Of course, Europe has recently experienced remarkably extreme temperatures and scorching fires across significant parts of the continent (heat estimated to have resulted in at least 16,000 extra deaths—and no, that is not a misprint—at its high point in June and at least 35,000 across the whole summer). Western Europe, in fact, experienced the hottest June on record. And that (or worse) is increasingly likely to be an every-summer event for what’s now the fastest-warming continent on this planet.
And don’t forget that the predicted El Niño in the Pacific beginning this fall, expected to be the strongest in more than a century, or a “Godzilla” event (if you happen to remember your movie dinosaurs), is likely to heat significant parts of the planet even more severely. (Oh, and in case you missed it, it’s not just the land that’s getting ever hotter. This August, the world’s oceans hit their hottest temperature ever—yes, ever!—adding, of course, to sea level rise and the further flooding of coastal communities.)
And sadly enough, we just can’t seem to stop, can we? Worse yet, humanity’s latest brilliant invention-discovery—artificial intelligence—may someday have to be relabeled artificial stupidity (of the first order), given that the production of AI is, it seems, going to involve pouring staggering amounts of—yes, of course!—fossil fuels into our already overheating atmosphere. As environmental expert Bill McKibben put it recently, “The planned data center buildout will increase greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector by at least 20%, and perhaps as much as a third.”
In truth, you’ve got to hand it to us humans when it comes to utter self-destructiveness (and I’m not even thinking about our never-ending, devastating wars from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan and Somalia that also pour endless fossil fuels into the atmosphere, as does the US military).
A Global Disaster That Needs a New Name
You would think, of course, that, faced with what’s likely to happen in the years to come, humanity might have responded by working ever harder to bring our fossil-fuel usage under control. But not much such luck there, of course. After all, China, the country that has moved in the most significant fashion on climate change by figuring out how to produce ever more green energy and sell globally the mechanisms—solar panels, batteries, and wind turbine equipment—that make it (as well as stunning numbers of electric vehicles), continues to pour the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere of any place on Earth.
And though other countries are indeed beginning to try to switch to green power, when you look at this endangered planet of ours, explain to me how, in 2024, the American people by a slight majority (even if not quite 50% of the vote) managed to reelect as president one Donald J. Trump, a climate-change denier of the first order. And in his second term in office, he’s focused as much attention as he’s capable of focusing (which, of course, is a distinctly limited amount) on blocking wind and solar projects while promoting ever more fossil-fuel production of every kind. (And of course, in the process, he’s brilliantly ceding the vast and growing green-energy sales market to that other superpower, China.)
Let me guarantee you one thing: Someday, when it comes to the overheating of this world of ours, he will be seen as an almost unparalleled idiot, assuming that anybody then is seeing much of anything.
Consider climate change, in fact, a potential global disaster that deserves a far more horrifying name. And consider it just the latest form of (in)human warfare to come to our attention, this time against the planet itself as a livable place for us. And consider it as well no small thing that we humans have indeed produced a second way to essentially destroy this planet and ourselves.
A Climate Bomb of a President
As for that first one, it’s still unsettling to think about the way the United States developed the atomic bomb and then used it twice in August 1945 to devastate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and end World War II in the Pacific. And those first two bombs did indeed represent, all too literally (or do I mean figuratively?), something new on this planet that, until that moment, had only been a dystopian fantasy—the possible future ability of humanity to totally devastate this planet of ours? In fact, given human history, consider it little short of a miracle that, 80 years later, with at least nine countries now possessing atomic weapons, often in significant quantities—there are now an estimated 12,000 such weapons on planet Earth—one has never been used again in wartime (although more than 2,000 have been detonated in atomic tests in what still passes for peacetime).
And there can be little question that, were an atomic war to break out between any of the great (or even lesser) powers on this planet, we could indeed find ourselves thoroughly devastated.
Now, give us humans distinct credit since, having developed a first way to functionally do in this planet of ours and ourselves, we then came up with a completely separate, distinctly slow-motion version of planetary destruction via our use of fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—to pour what have come to be known as greenhouse gases that trap heat into the atmosphere, potentially broiling this planet in a process that’s come to be known all too mildly as—yes!—“climate change.” (Think of it, in fact, as a slow-motion version of atomic warfare happening right before our eyes every moment of every day.)
And unfortunately, when it became ever more obvious that this was indeed another way to do this planet in, the response was sadly all too different from atomic weaponry, with the urge to stop it proving far milder than it should be.
And of course, in 2024, Americans did indeed vote to reelect a presidential candidate all too literally committed to broiling this planet of ours (as, by the way, is Vladimir Putin, the ruler of one of the other great powers on this planet). Yes, the Don is indeed an atomic bomb or at least a climate bomb of a president his second time around. And don’t forget that, this time, among the donors celebrating his victory and inauguration with giant financial contributions was oil company Chevron with $500,000. (In fact, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has reported that, overall, oil companies invested $5 million in that inauguration alone—and even that may be a low estimate.)
And yes, his second time in office he did also launch his own version of a global nuclear arms race, but that, sadly, is the least of it, since he’s distinctly determined to release ever more fossil fuels into our world, while doing anything he can to shut down wind power, in particular. Oh, and don’t forget that, amid all the climate chaos and—thanks to his war on Iran—fossil fuel chaos as well, he continues to make a fortune (as much as $15.5 million or a nearly 40% rise since January) from fossil fuel stocks he owns, including shares in ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Occidental Petroleum. And more are evidently still being purchased for him.
And all of that is a reality of our world even as, thanks to his war with Iran, American drivers continue to pay ever more for their gas. And with that new El Niño climate pattern already on the all-too-literal horizon and guaranteed to wildly overheat the Pacific Ocean, starting this fall, this planet is only going to get hotter yet. That coming “Godzilla” event could, as The Guardian reports, “push about 50 million people worldwide into acute hunger before the end of next year.”
In short, “our” president is making a fortune off end-of-the-world policies. Think of him, in fact, not figuratively, but all too literally, as the president from hell.
And if you want to add to the potentially world-ending nightmares of this planet at this very moment, keep in mind that, over its long history, humanity has proven all too brilliant when it comes to destruction. So don’t for a second imagine that there isn’t, in fact, a third (or even a fourth) way to do us all in still waiting to be discovered just over (or under?) the present horizon.
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We Need a President Who Wants to Build a Better Country, Not a Bigger Ballroom
Trump understands how to wield power. His objectives and motivations are all wrong, but we need a president who will to exert executive authority in the name of the common good and a brighter future for our nation.
Sep 10, 2026
We are in a situation, as a country, and I think largely as the West generally, that only Trump can solve.
Now, I don’t mean specifically Donald J. Trump. I mean specifically a person who understands power in the same way Donald Trump understands power. He understands that the executive branch is enormous, that it works for the president, and that when all of that power is pointed toward a purpose it can push through a hell of a lot of blockades. Treasury, Labor, Commerce, Energy, Transportation, federal procurement, federal credit, federal land, regulatory agencies, it’s all power. A president can treat that machinery as something to politely administer, or decide the country needs to go somewhere and put it to work getting there.
Trump has done the second thing. He has pushed presidential authority on tariffs, executive control over the government, elections, executive orders, independent agencies and the courts. When one route gets blocked, he looks for another. His sweeping emergency tariffs were struck down, so the administration moved to other existing tariff authorities. His administration has tried to use federal power to change the rules around mail voting and has pushed a broad version of the unitary executive, the idea that a president elected to carry out a program must be able to control the executive branch charged with carrying it out. You can argue about the legality of any particular move, and the courts obviously have. The thing I am interested in is that he understands where the power is and is willing to use it.
The Democrats largely recoil from this idea. Part of that is their commitment to neoliberalism, and part of it is what I consider a perverted view of liberalism generally. There is this idea that the president should manage the government, send some proposals to Congress, wait for the courts, respect every inherited norm, avoid picking too many fights and explain to everybody that change takes time.
One of the most successful Democratic presidents in American history rejected that notion.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood power. He understood that the country had elected him to do something and that doing something meant fighting people who didn’t want it done. He named financial monopoly, reckless banking and organized money as enemies. He welcomed their hatred. He even went after incumbent Democrats who were standing in the way of the New Deal. His 1938 effort to knock off conservative Democrats mostly failed, but the important thing is that he tried. He wasn’t a “blue no matter who” president.
Roosevelt also understood something about checks and balances that party leaders ignore. Checks and balances are not just something that exists inside the government. There has to be a balance of power between markets, corporations, financial institutions and people. If, as they have now, corporations and the ultra wealthy have enough economic power, they can manage our lives without ever passing a law. Prices can control where we live. Employers control our healthcare options. Banks decide who gets credit. Utilities decide what electricity costs. A handful of companies control supply, wages, access and entire markets.
The only entity capable of balancing power away from the ultra wealthy and back toward ordinary people is us through our government. Roosevelt knew that market intervention was required, that the existing stranglehold of private power would prevent us from building the country we needed.
So he put the government to work producing.
The federal government directly hired people. It directly built things. It financed factories, built dams, generated electricity, expanded electric transmission, built public housing, roads, schools, parks and public buildings, financed rural electrification and created institutions that did not exist before. When millions of people needed work, programs like the WPA and CCC didn’t use tax credits or incentives to encourage private companies to do the work. The government hired them and put them to work building things the country needed.
TVA is probably the cleanest example. The government did not ask private utilities to please make electricity cheaper and more available across the Tennessee Valley. It built dams, generated power and created a public power system capable of transforming an entire region. That same capacity later helped power wartime industry and the Manhattan Project.
Then the war came and this way of thinking went into overdrive. The production requirements were absurd. We needed more planes, ships, tanks, trucks, engines, aluminum, rubber and ammunition than the existing industrial system could possibly produce. If Roosevelt had accepted the normal assumptions about how long factories took to build and how slowly markets adjusted, the answer would have been that it couldn’t be done. Europe would have lost the war.
Luckily for us FDR didn’t accept that answer.
Big Bill Knudsen, the former president of General Motors, became one of the people Roosevelt put to work organizing production. The government financed factories, built factories, owned factories, paid private companies to operate factories, allocated scarce materials, guaranteed demand and forced production priorities toward the things the country needed. The Detroit Arsenal is a perfect example. We needed tanks, so the government financed and built a giant tank plant and had Chrysler operate it. The point was not ideological purity about who owned what. We needed the factory, so we built the factory.
That is the part people leave out when they talk about American capitalism winning the war. The market didn’t wake up one morning, notice a profitable opportunity to defeat Hitler and organically produce the arsenal of democracy. The government decided what had to exist and then organized the public and private capacity needed to make it exist.
We did the same thing over and over again. We produced enough material to equip ourselves and supply the Allies. We built enough industrial capacity that after the war the United States could help rebuild Europe, build huge amounts of housing and infrastructure, expand electricity and create the material abundance people now look back on as if it somehow appeared naturally.
Donald Trump understands the power part. His problem is purpose.
He can point the executive branch toward immigrants, DEI, universities, the radical left, bureaucrats he considers disloyal, mail voting, allies, or whatever enemy is useful that week, and even if he defeated every one of them tomorrow, their houses would still cost too much, their healthcare would still cost too much, their electric bill would still be too high, childcare would still be too expensive, their town would still have too few doctors, their roads and bridges would still need work, their kids would still be wondering how the hell they are going to afford a house, and the country would still not have enough manufacturing capacity to make many of the things we depend on.
Roosevelt pointed power toward production. Electricity, jobs, housing, infrastructure, finance, labor power, factories, industrial capacity. If private capital would not build what was needed, government could build it. If private finance wouldn’t finance it, government would. If people needed jobs, government could hire them. If private utilities wouldn’t electrify poor communities at an affordable price, public power did.
This is the part modern Democrats seem determined to forget. They love storytelling. They love talking about fairness, dignity, community and opportunity. They seem much less interested in the fact that Roosevelt’s politics were believable because something existed underneath the story. People could see the dam. They could see the electric line. They could see the road. They could see the factory being built and their neighbor going to work.
The story worked because it was attached to a vision, a bold vision, and then that vision was attached to doing.
That is also what people misunderstand about vision. A vision does not become believable because it is small. Getting to the moon was ridiculous. Rebuilding the industrial base? Providing healthcare to every American? Building enough housing to make it affordable? Training hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses, engineers, machinists and tradespeople? All quite ridiculous.
Until we start doing it.
If you say you are going to the moon and then build the rockets, launch facilities, factories, training programs and engineering teams, and start blowing shit up in Florida, people begin to believe you might actually be going to the moon.
The thing I hear over and over whenever we talk about rebuilding the country is that it takes time. Of course it takes time. A factory takes time to build. A doctor takes time to train. A power plant takes time to construct. The decision to start takes time. Starting doesn’t. The fact that a project takes six years to finish can’t require ten years of debate before the first shovel goes into the ground.
The executive branch is enormous, and when it is wielded toward a purpose it can coordinate agencies, use federal purchasing to create markets, use federal credit to finance capacity, use procurement to change what gets produced, direct departments to use old authorities in new ways, and force Congress and the courts to respond to a government that is already moving instead of spending years asking permission to imagine moving.
Trump understands that. Roosevelt understood it too.
The difference that matters is what the power is for.
If we want people to believe democratic government can solve their problems, democratic government is going to have to solve some fucking problems. It is going to have to build things again, produce things again, hire people, generate electricity, build transmission, build housing, expand medical capacity, build factories and create enough material abundance that ordinary people can see their lives getting better.
Then we can tell the story.
It’s time we find a president ready and willing to use executive power to build a better America, not a bigger ballroom.
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