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Donald Trump Wants You to Put on a Sweater
Is Trump the new Jimmy Carter?
One of the most striking things about the days and months after 9/11 was how little the government asked of us.
If you’re old enough, you no doubt remember watching the horrors of those attacks unfold on live television. It instantly felt like a historical turning point. Talking heads on TV made constant comparisons to Pearl Harbor, a moment that propelled the United States into a war effort that cost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives.
The nation was united in outrage and sorrow — united, we now know, for the last time in the last quarter century. Pundits wondered how George W. Bush would use this surge of patriotism to better the country and fight its foes. Would there be a draft for the wars that were on the horizon? Would Bush require young people to enroll in a national service corps to improve the country? In those fall days of 2001, I kept waiting to be asked to do something. What role would I play in defeating the scourge of global terrorism?
But George W. Bush never asked me for much. He asked me to report suspicious activity to the authorities, I guess. He asked me to look the other way while the executive branch hoarded power and took away the civil liberties of people it suspected were up to no good. But mostly he wanted me to go shopping.
Yes, shopping. In a remarkable bit of mental gymnastics, the Bush administration decided that the best way to strengthen America and defy Al Qaeda was to be selfish. It was our patriotic duty to revive the airline industry by taking a vacation. As Bush said just a couple of weeks after the attacks:
When they struck, they wanted to create an atmosphere of fear. And one of the great goals of this nation’s war is to restore public confidence in the airline industry. It’s to tell the traveling public: Get on board. Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed…
Before that, Vice President Dick Cheney had gone on Meet the Press and told Americans that they could
stick their thumb in the eye of the terrorists and say that…
