WINTER FIELD
Living just north of Soho in lower Manhattan, I used to take a break from my desk by walking south to the World Trade Center, near Wall Street, and once ascending to the restaurant on the top of the North Tower. Soho was then in transition from factories for light manufacturing to lofts inhabited largely by painters. Being trendy and also convenient to the stock exchange, banks, and import-export offices, the area soon attracted big-money folks who bid up the rents and who, as the artists necessarily decamped, wondered why the area was becoming relatively dull. In those days nobody suspected that the twin towers would, as in some sort of monstrous video game, become a target for jetliners.
Many years later, I watched the astonishing events of 9/11 from the San Francisco Bay Area, but it happened in my old neighborhood. Soon that day we heard about the plane plowing into the Pentagon. Let’s see: finance, the military. What could be left as a target for terrorists except civil authority? We learned that United flight 93, under the control of hijackers, had been headed for the White House or Capitol building before a revolt among passengers led to its crashing into a Pennsylvania field. Either missed target would have been like a Reichstag fire which, in 1932, had allowed Hitler to take total control of Germany.
As it was, the attack led only to the “global war on terror” to intervention in Afghanistan, now in its 16th year, and to the invasion of uninvolved Iraq. It also led to the Patriot Act and the end of privacy, as later revealed by Edward Snowden and others.
But that was a long while ago. What about now? Now troubling parallels are being noticed by observers whose sense of history extends further than yesterday’s “news cycle.” The possibility of a U.S. Reichstag fire is the subject of warnings by such writers as Russell (911-Strike), Connolly (Common Dreams), McElvaine (HuffPost), Heinberg (Museletter), Snyder (New York Review of Books), and Harris (Raw Story).
This event would not have to take the form of a fire or its target be the national legislature, as in the case of the Reichstag. Any event sufficiently horrifying and disorienting would now serve, especially if it were done by a terrorist from one of the countries from which our leader wanted to exclude all travelers. In a tweet, Trump has already set it up to blame the judiciary. In the system of checks and balances, that would leave only the Congress, both houses of which are in the hands of the President’s party and which has shown no clear signs of being ready to impeach him.
Trump’s modus operandi is to double-down, never to apologize or be seen to retreat. If Mueller is about to indict, what would Trump have to lose? We Americans often admire a man who tries hard even when it doesn’t work out. Nothing “unifies” the country like a war or other signs of “strength.”
And if his best attempt fails, even if Trump can’t pardon himself, as distinct from many of his appointees and his family, can’t he rely on Mike Pence to absolve him and urge us to “put it behind us”? (Would Pence want to alienate what remained of Trump’s “base”? And he has a precedent, albeit dubious, in Gerald Ford’s pardon of his predecessor.)
The dispatch of Trump back to the tower with his name on top would be less distressing than the collapse of the twin towers on 9/11. Instead of an impulsive president, we would in that event have an ideologue who could pretend to be reasonable at least until after the mid-term elections.