President Donald Trump delivered a moving statement commemorating the anniversary of 9/11 on Monday, reassuring the country that we have in place (finally) a strong leader who takes seriously the threat coming from Islamic terrorism. In his speech, Trump said that “the living, breathing soul of America wept with grief” over the many lives lost on that fateful day sixteen years ago. At the Pentagon, President Trump sent a message to the terrorists who still populate the world: “America cannot be intimidated.”
Anyone with any objectivity would listen to those words – and their inner voice of common sense – and conclude that this country is far better off today than we were the last time this anniversary rolled around. Trump is the anti-Obama when it comes to matters of national security; his administration can’t stop every conceivable terrorist attack that might hit our shores, but we have a lot more faith in our collective ability to stop an attack than we did under the last guy.
Naturally, the liberals at The Atlantic think otherwise. That’s why, on September 11, writer Conor Friedersdorf published a fact-free essay warning readers that “Donald Trump has left America less prepared for another 9/11.”
Now, what might you expect from an article with that headline? Some information to back up the argument, right? Well, you’ll get no such satisfaction from this bit of fluff. In Friedersdorf’s desperation to write something grossly partisan on the anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in American history, he ignores the inconvenient problem of…you know…not having an argument to make.
So he talks about Trump’s lack of governing experience. He talks about his bankruptcies. He talks about his “moral compass” and the reservations he has about his “character.” He talks about these things because, clearly, he realized only after his editors assigned him the piece that he had nothing of substance to say about how, EXACTLY, America was now less prepared to deal with 9/11. Which, in itself, is another way of saying that America is somehow more susceptible to another 9/11 thanks to Donald J. Trump.
When Friedersdorf finally does get down to making a substantive argument, the points he makes are, at best, embarrassing.
“The White House is in constant disarray as key personnel are hired and fired at an unprecedented rate,” he writes, although we doubt he would argue for bringing back Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon.
“Huge numbers of important State Department positions are still unfilled,” he writes, as though the next major terrorist attack will come about as a failure of diplomacy.
“The United States is as divided as it has been at any time in my life,” he writes, plainly stretching to fill a word count.
“Those are just a few of the factors that have rendered Trump’s America less prepared to meet major challenges than it was during the administration of any other president in the postwar era,” he concludes – a lazy high schooler strangely certain that by simply blathering on for a few pages in an essay, he has come anywhere close to proving his thesis.
But hey, it’s September, things in America are looking up, and liberal writers are getting desperate to find novel ways in which to attack President Trump. It’s probably only going to get worse from here.
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