"SA: I’m very grateful for the opportunity. In the book I try to explain that the forces defining the post-9/11 era were nothing new in American history—that 9/11 was a circumstance that gave the most violent, nativist, and racist aspects of American history a new rationale in an era of righteous, patriotic urgency. The War on Terror was an inflection point, and it had yet to be properly contextualized that way. We’ve had so many explanations on offer for Trump, many of which are very good and persuasive. My close friend Adam Serwer, for instance, has demonstrated how rooted Trump is in white supremacy and nativism that have been present throughout US history. But I wanted to demonstrate that the War on Terror is crucial context for all of the other explanations.
Birtherism, for instance—which was how Trump really launched his political ascension—was not just anti-Black racism; it was also part of the culture of the War on Terror. It said Barack Obama was America’s enemy not just because he was supposedly secretly Kenyan, but specifically because he was supposedly a Kenyan Muslim, and that people like him were responsible for the attacks. The atmosphere of emergency post-9/11 allowed these things to fuse together and grow in intensity. I wrote Reign of Terror because I had grown frustrated with how all of the other explanations for Trump left out how by 2016 we had experienced 15 years of an agonizing, inconclusive war against a non-white enemy, from a religion that most Americans are unfamiliar with and regard as something to be feared. That was present in Trump’s own words, and he surrounded himself with some of the most vicious and exploitative proponents of that culture—including Mike Flynn, John Kelly, Erik Prince, Jeff Sessions, and Rudy Giuliani, among others.
Now we have all this gauzy bullshit rhetoric about how America was united, which it never truly was. America was mobilized against an enemy, both internally and abroad. That’s not unity or solidarity, it’s predation. We need to always remember that. Unfortunately, as we can see from how so much of the media and the Washington establishment responded to Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, no lessons have been learned."
