Twenty-Five Years After 9/11

(Adapted from “How to Wreck America in 20 Months, by Harlan Ullman, The Hill, 09/09/2026)

“With the 25th anniversary of the attack on New York’s Twin Towers days away, Osama bin Laden, along with Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, must be rolling in their graves. All their attempts to defeat America failed. Yet, in 20 months, Donald Trump has probably done more damage to this nation than many of our enemies.”

• Trump removed the checks and balances of the Constitution.
• Trump’s tariffs are harming U.S. families, costing, on average, around $1,300 more per year in 2026 — but also harming the global economy.
• Trump is engaging in a trade war with the biggest U.S. trading partner, Canada.
• While birthright citizenship is unambiguously stated in the Constitution, Trump is using executive orders as a workaround.
• Trump demolished the East Wing to build a ballroom. He promised the project would be funded by private donors, but the government will now be assuming construction costs.
• Both parties have become isolated and destructive in treating the opposition as enemies to be destroyed. Not since the Civil War and Vietnam has the U.S. public been so divided.
• Trump has turned the presidency into a money-printing machine. His wealth has increased by a few billion, largely through crypto. How much money has been siphoned to his sons and son-in-law, with billions of Saudi and Gulf states’ money to manage? And how much is Donald Trump Jr. making from Pentagon contracts and work that would not be available to someone lacking the last name of Trump?
• Trump has rejected and ruined 80 years of international cooperation. From 1949 until now, NATO was the greatest military alliance in history. Trump has gone out of his way to bully and threaten NATO members to spend more on defense, or else. U.S. forces are being withdrawn or redeployed from NATO countries. Demands to take over Greenland were deeply absurd, offensive, and impossible to achieve.
• Trump has embraced Russian president Vladimir Putin. His disrespectful treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the withholding of support from the Russia-Ukraine war has aided Russia.
• Trump’s rekindling of his bromance with North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un has not gone down well with our treaty partners in the South.
• U.S. has blundered into a quagmire in the Gulf. Unless strong remedial diplomatic action starts now, this war could make the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan seem like successes.