Today is our 13th wedding anniversary.
And every day with my beloved
is a treasured gift for which
I am profoundly grateful.
🙏💜Molly
Monday, September 14, 2026
Sunday, September 13, 2026
Dr. Stacey Patton: God Is Not a Republican: A Sunday Sermon Against Surrendering Your Soul to an Evil Politician
Trump has Republican convention crowd pledge
to vote in midterms or "go to hell"
The doors of the church are open. Good morning, Saints.
Beloved children of the sun, I want you to turn to your neighbor and say, “Neighbor, the devil is a lie!”
Now turn to your other neighbor and say, “Neighbor, god is not a Republican.”
Saints, did Y’all see all that theological foolishness that went down this week at the Republican midterm convention? Did Y’all see that hot mess?
f you missed it, the Orange Menace promised every adult citizen $5,000 if the Republicans win both the House and the Senate midterm elections. Let’s see Y’all, $5,000 . . . times about 260 million eligible voters . . . equals roughly $1.3 trillion. Now, y’all ain’t nobody gettin’ one red cent. Trump knew that cash-back offer wasn’t gonna close the deal, and that’s why the next night he came back and threatened people with the lake of fire.
Trump stood before the crowd and told them to raise their hand and take a pledge to him as the “greatest president.” He’s a damn lie. He told them people that they should go vote even if they aren’t registered. So basically cheat. And then he capped off his speech by saying that if they don’t vote Republican, they’re goin’ to hell.
Umph.
Saints, tell me, since when did the ballot become a ticket to glory?
If there really is a hell, some of them people are going whether they vote Republican, Democrat, or stay their sinful MAGA asses at home on November 3.
Now, this atheist preacher knows her Bible. And I ain’t seen nary a scripture that says anything about the Lamb’s Book of Life turning into a GOP voter-registration roll on Judgement Day. It don’t say nothin’ about Saint Peter checkin’ people’s ballots or Gabriel workin’ Republican turnout.
But according to America’s president, Jesus has surrendered the keys of the kingdom to the GOP. Donald Judas Trump wants folk to believe that Jesus Christ, the man who lived for three decades and spent his earthly years ministering to all kinds of people, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, raising the dead, welcoming the strangers, snuggling children, fighting for justice, and resurrecting after his own execution is standing at the gates of heaven right now ready to ask folk, “Did you vote red?”
Proverbs 29:12 told about leaders like Donald Trump: “If a ruler hearken to lies, all his servants are wicked.”
Church, if we believe Donald Trump, Jesus is gonna be standing there at the gates with a fresh silk press, his beard lined up, face glowing, hands stretched out saying, “Come unto me. Paid for by the Republican National Committee.”
Ohhh, Y’all ain’t ready to hear me preach this morning.
Saints, the news media simply treated what he said as just another one of his outrageous remarks that he makes at his Klan rallies. But this man, who is a criminal, a thief, a liar, a cheat, a sexual predator, a whole degenerate, refuses to accept earthly responsibility for all his crimes. And yet he has the gall to appoint himself the administrator of eternal consequences. He is really out here weaponizing people’s fear of eternal punishment and trying to make partisan obedience synonymous with righteousness.
But Jesus warned us about false prophets who think they can control access to heaven. Matthew 23:13 says, “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men.” And Second Peter 2:3 says that false teachers like Donald Trump will use “feigned words” to “make merchandise of you.”
That is exactly what we witnessed at the GOP convention. We saw Trump, a political con man putting heaven behind a partisan paywall. We heard him trying to sell salvation for Republican votes. And we heard him threatening folks with eternal damnation if the votes don’t swing his way.
Church, this is spiritual extortion. Church, salvation is being turned into a campaign promise. Church, eternal damnation is being turned into a voter-suppression tactic. What kind of Christianity tells people to give us your vote, your loyalty, and your obedience or somethin’ terrible is gonna happen to your soul?
The Third Commandment says, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” But Trump has got the Christian god’s name all up in his mouth and using it to legitimize his greedy, evil political agenda.
Saints, this is counterfeit Christianity and we’ve seen it before. Slaveholders quoted Scripture while selling and brutalizing our ancestors. Confederates claimed the Lord’s blessing while fighting to preserve human bondage. Jim Crow segregationists filled church pews on Sunday mornings and lynched Black folks before dinner and ice cream. Trump is continuing that theology of white Christian nationalism by appointing himself as the earthly interpreter of god’s will. And he wants us to believe that if the Republicans lose come November, the election must have been stolen because their god could never permit anybody else to govern.
Saints, turn to your neighbor and say, “Neighbor, god is not a Republican. God is with the oppressed.”
Black Liberation Theology teaches us that any theology that places god on the side of the oppressor is not the gospel that Jesus Christ taught. No, it is the theology of Empire.
A theology of what Isaiah called “unrighteous decrees.” A theology that robs the poor of justice. A theology that Amos says tramples the needy while living comfortably from their suffering. A theology that James says hoards wealth and cheats workers. A theology that Jesus says is peddled by religious hypocrites who shut the kingdom of heaven in other people’s faces.
This atheist preacher knows her Bible. And scripture tells us that god doesn’t care about your vote. God doesn’t care about who you vote for. God doesn’t care about what party you vote for. Your party affiliation ain’t a prerequisite for eternal life. A god worth serving cares about justice or harm that’s produced by your political choices. Your vote is not a condition of salvation.
Amen?!!
Brotha Willie, play your organ.
A god of justice does not direct anger toward people’s voting choices. A god of justice directs anger toward corrupt, evil-ass rulers who crush the vulnerable and at people whose political choices help them. A god of justice directs anger at people who won’t feed the hungry. Who deny healthcare to the sick and dying. Merchants exploit workers. Lawmakers and judges who pervert justice. And religious leaders who help them do it with their blessings and prayers.
Saints, god is not a Republican. You know how I know? Because the Bible says we know false prophets by their fruit. It says so right there in Matthew 7:20: “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”
Beloved children of the sun, let us inspect the GOP’s fruit.
What is their fruit?
Their fruit is hatred and racism. Their fruit is xenophobia, ICE raids, and mass deportations. Their fruit is family separation. Their fruit is voter suppression and white grievance.
Their fruit is censorship and book bans. Divestment from public education. Taking away access to funding for higher education. Their fruit is greed. Vengeance. Deception. Forced birth without care for living children. Denying healthcare.
Their fruit is cruelty against queer and transgender folk. Their fruit is police killing Black folk and blaming them for their own deaths. Their fruit is unnecessary war and environmental destruction. Their fruit is Christian nationalism and authoritarianism and an endless appetite for domination.
Their fruit is rotten to the core!
And saints, the sad thing is that millions of Americans believe Donald Trump’s rotten theology. That’s because a lot of folks were raised on fear-based Christianity. They were taught that terror and obedience make them righteous. They were taught that you can’t challenge authority. That you can’t ask questions. That you can’t wrestle with scripture or god.
Donald Trump and the GOP know this and this is why he finds value in activating and exploiting their deepest spiritual fears for political gain. Christian nationalism is a theology of domination that replaces Jesus with strongmen and dictators. It is a theology of coercion that swaps discipleship with party loyalty, and liberation with obedience.
But 1 John 4:18 tells us, “Perfect love casts out fear.”
Saints, don’t miss the message here. Scripture is telling us that a god worth serving gives you what? Unconditional love. That kind of god gives you peace and confidence. That kind of god doesn’t have you walking around with your head on a swivel, ducking and dodging, living in fear and dread. Saints, when you’ve got deep unconditional love, then a strongman’s manipulation and fear tactics lose power over you.
Beloved children of the sun, any religion that’s got to that’s got to yell at you, that’s got to threaten you to make you believe its truth, that’s got to use hellfire and brimstone to terrify you into political submission ain’t worth a damn. That kind of theology doesn’t possesses truth or love.
And Saints, we ain’t got to imagine hell as some distant place far beneath the Earth. No, hell is right here. All around us. Every which way. Human beings have manufactured hell through poverty, racism, sexism, xenophobia, injustice, abuse, prisons, deportation cages, Gaza, apartheid systems, and indifference to suffering. Evil people like Donald Trump keep creating hell for everybody else every single day. Every day. And then they come out every election cycle to demand our votes as proof that the Christian god approves of their political fuckery.
Saints, god is not a Republican. God does not reside in Donald Trump. His name is not written above the gates of heaven. If you are a Christian believer, your Bible has already told you that no president commands the throne of god, and no ballot can purchase anybody’s salvation. Do not outsource your conscience or surrender your soul to a politician who has mistaken himself for god and tells you to “vote republican or go to hell.”
Yes, Donald Trump is a billionaire. He’s got his name on buildings, merch, and his awful face on money. But this false teacher who is Satan’s constant worker, does not have the authority to put anyone’s name in or remove it from the Book of Life. And let that be our closing prayer.
Now let the church say Amen, Amen, and Amen.
Please go here for the original article: https://drstaceypatton1865.substack.com/p/god-is-not-a-republican-a-sunday
Friday, September 11, 2026
EXCELLENT — Osama Bin Laden Won
WOW! This article from The Intercept is excellent, chilling, and unspeakably infuriating, horrifying, heartbreaking, and true! Nick Turse absolutely 100% nails the utterly devastating reality and catastrophic impacts of the collapse of the American Empire and the ongoing immense global suffering, death, and destruction left in its wake. This is also the long standing and ever growing reflection of the shadow side of our country, what bell hooks described as “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Tragedy upon tragedy upon ever building tragedy. When oh when will We The People ever hold the powerful accountable and work together to stop the madness?!? — Molly
By Nick Turse
September 11 2026
President Donald Trump has refused to attend the ceremony at Ground Zero marking the 25th anniversary of the Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center — reportedly because he wanted to deliver a speech, and the annual event has long barred remarks by politicians. Trump, a native New Yorker who has often employed 9/11 as a rhetorical device, will instead head to the Pentagon, which was also attacked that day, where he can rant, rave, bellow, and bemoan whatever he is worked up about. He may, in the process, also pay cursory tribute to the victims in an aside.
“We recall the light of America’s best and bravest and the love that they showed in their final moments,” Trump said during last year’s 9/11 remembrance at the Pentagon. That, however, was scripted pablum. It’s far more illustrative to “recall” Trump’s thoughts on the attack on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, when New Yorkers were united in grief. Well, most of them.
Asked about the Trump Building at 40 Wall Street during a live TV interview that clear and cloudless afternoon, Trump took the opportunity to tout the increased standing that his building had just gained from the devastating terrorist attack. Trump made certain to note that his building “actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest.” Like Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Trump then took his own 9/11 victory lap. “When they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest,” he observed of 40 Wall Street. “And now it’s the tallest.” Like innumerable Trump statements in the 25 years since, it was callous and cringe-worthy and, of course, untrue. Nearby 70 Pine Street was actually taller.
Twenty-five years ago, I could not have imagined, as I watched the Twin Towers topple, that the New York real estate buffoon who used 9/11 to aggrandize his property’s height would become America’s president. And if you told me Trump’s supporters would attack the Capitol — something Al Qaeda tried and failed to do on 9/11 — to subvert the democratic process, that the insurrection would fail but that Trump would still be reelected, I would have laughed. But that and so much else came to pass, as the danger posed by Trump surpassed Al Qaeda and every other foreign threat to America. Bin Laden is long gone, but his spiritual successor remains ensconced in the White House. The Al Qaeda leader couldn’t have hoped for better.
— Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch
How Two Trust-Funded Terrorists Destroyed America
I can still remember the smell. But I’m at a loss to accurately describe it to you. It wasn’t the unmistakable odor of death, although that must have been some tiny part of it. It wasn’t like burning tires or plastic or even metal. It was all that, but it was more.
In the quarter century since, I’ve been all over the world, but I’ve never experienced anything like the smell near the rubble pile at Ground Zero in September 2001. The air was acrid and thick, a swirl of toxins and carcinogens made possible by turning two large, jet-fuel laden planes into cruise missiles and aiming them at gigantic office towers. As it burned, we all inhaled a haze of pulverized cement, glass fibers, asbestos, lead, dioxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls (better known as PCBs), and whatever else. It remains a part of us still.
The 9/11 attacks — which killed almost 3,000 Americans, toppled New York City’s Twin Towers, wrecked the Pentagon, and took down a plane near Shanksville, Pennsylvania — marked the most devastating intelligence failure in U.S. history and sent the United States into a paroxysm of self-induced catastrophes from which it has never emerged. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s spectacular coordinated assault supercharged what had been a slow-motion imperial decline, trapping the U.S. in a death spiral of ruinous intertwined economic debacles, foreign policy failures, democratic backsliding, authoritarianism, and debilitating wars and military interventions.
Bin Laden’s plan was to trap the U.S. in expensive, foreign quagmire wars that would trigger a domestic economic collapse. It was patterned on the strategy that the local mujahideen, he and other foreign fighters, and the U.S. and its allies had used to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Not only does bin Laden’s strategy continue apace long after his 2011 death, but it also spawned an even more effective means of destroying America from within. Bin Laden’s attacks turned the U.S. government into an engine for the destruction of America, inducing it to implement policies that have devastated the country and immiserated its people. That includes unrestrained spending while cutting taxes on the rich, closer ties with despotic regimes, the sneak-and-peek warrants and roving wiretaps of the Patriot Act and other domestic surveillance programs, and the ruinous failed forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
This swirl of toxic policies and governmental overreach opened the door to something beyond bin Laden’s wildest dreams, the rise of an even more effective terrorist who has crippled the U.S. in countless ways and sought to strangle the best of the country: President Donald Trump.
The So-Called Pearl Harbor of the 21st century was no surprise. Long before President George W. Bush, while vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, received a classified intelligence memo titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S,” the Al Qaeda leader had been honest about his plans. “The call to wage war against America was made because America has spear-headed the crusade against the Islamic nation,” he announced in a 1998 TV interview, castigating the U.S. for stationing troops in the Middle East and its support of Israel. “The Western regimes and the government of the United States of America bear the blame for what might happen. If their people do not wish to be harmed inside their very own countries, they should seek to elect governments that are truly representative of them and that can protect their interests.”
When bin Laden made good on his threats, slaughtering thousands on 9/11, he knew it was bound to trigger a response. One possibility was a measured law-enforcement action that would end with arrests and legitimate legal proceedings. The other was a president standing on a rubble pile, vowing revenge, a never-ending fruitless war against a tactic (terror), a secret torture gulag, a forever prison, and a kangaroo court. One would be ruinous for bin Laden. The other, an answer to his prayers.
Bin Laden’s masterstroke was to attack the U.S. after it had elected a lightweight nepo-baby president and a power-mad vice president who had cut his teeth in Richard Nixon’s criminal-packed White House. While he came to be an enemy of Donald Trump, it was Dick Cheney who paved the way for America’s current would-be tyrant, with the vice president’s relentless campaign to concentrate power in the White House, creating an imperial presidency predicated on the “unitary executive theory,” a misbegotten notion that the Constitution grants the president unrestrained authority over domestic and foreign policy, such as unilaterally removing government officials and waging wars.
In both style and substance, Cheney prefigured Trump. In the immediate wake of 9/11, Cheney went on TV to announce the government would now operate on the “dark side,” as he put it, claiming “a lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion.”
America has never emerged from those sinister shadows. Cheney was arguably the leading cheerleader for the ruinous war on terror, which began in Afghanistan, spread across the globe, and grinds on a year after his death; a prime architect of the disastrous Iraq War and the faulty, unverified, and cherry-picked intelligence that underpinned it; an enthusiastic supporter of torture, calling the waterboarding of detainees “a no-brainer”; a vocal supporter of domestic surveillance; a promoter of undemocratic, unprecedented, and unparalleled secrecy; and a belligerent bully.
“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a 2022 ad for his daughter, Liz, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump at the end of his first term. He might have been right — and he was certainly responsible. Trump has built on Cheney’s accomplishments and pushed America toward autocracy at an unprecedented rate.
After weakening American democracy during his first term, Trump launched a full-scale assault — literally — on it. Despite knowing he lost the 2020 presidential election, Trump refused to concede, worked to subvert vote counts and undermine the certification process, pressured state officials to “find” votes, and orchestrated what special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on it called an “unprecedented criminal effort” to remain in power.
Trump has built on Cheney's accomplishments and pushed America toward autocracy at an unprecedented rate.
Bin Laden was never able to raise an army in America, lead an insurrection, and launch an attack on the U.S. Capitol. (The plane meant to carry out that attack on 9/11 crashed in rural Pennsylvania.) But on January 6, 2021, with Trump’s encouragement, MAGA supporters stormed the Capitol. The House Select Committee that investigated the “domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex and issues relating to the interference with the peaceful transfer of power” concluded that Trump engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 Presidential election.” It found that Trump, for hours, deliberately failed to act to stop his followers from attacking the Capitol. Smith said that the evidence gathered by his team “was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” had the American people not reelected Trump.
Bin Laden would have no doubt cheered the attack on the Capitol and endorsed Trump’s reelection run, had he been alive. And he would not have been disappointed by the results. Upon returning to office, Trump unleashed a coordinated assault on American democracy, undermining the rule of law and fundamental freedoms by pardoning and rewarding insurrectionists; weaponizing the Justice Department, regulatory agencies, and the military against American citizens; firing government watchdogs; attacking the free press; engaging in naked and unrestrained corruption, such as violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause; engaging in due process violations, immigration lawlessness, and unconstitutional executive power-grabs; and launching a disastrous war with Iran and a murder-spree on the high seas amid a host of other foreign and domestic policy fiascos.
Since January 2025, there have been nearly 4,000 separate authoritarian acts by the Trump administration including around 1,050 undermining democracy, more than 940 suppressing dissent, over 650 aggressive or destabilizing foreign policy efforts, about 600 acts weakening civil rights, around 500 centered around controlling information or spreading misinformation, and more than 320 acts of corruption, according to the Trump Action Tracker, which documents acts and statements of Trump and his administration that echo those of other authoritarian regimes.
A startling global analysis also discovered “autocratization” in America rose at a speed “unprecedented in modern history” last year. Under Trump, the researchers found, the U.S. has ceased to be a functioning liberal democracy after the largest one-year drop in democratic principles in American history. This took the country back to 1965 levels, when Jim Crow racial discrimination in voting — including violence and intimidation, poll taxes, and literacy tests — were still commonplace. These results are bolstered by research by the nonprofit group Protect Democracy, which finds that the corrupting of elections, quashing of dissent, spreading of disinformation, and aggrandizing of executive power are all “escalating” in Trump’s second term, while both authoritarian actions and the politicizing of independent institutions in the U.S. are “rapidly escalating.”
In 2001, the U.S. government recorded a budget surplus of about $28 billion and was projected to pay off the national debt by 2009. But after miring the U.S. in forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere, bin Laden looked upon the fruits of 9/11 and took a victory lap in 2004, bragging that his strategy of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy” had helped to push the U.S. deficit to “more than a trillion dollars.”
“All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note,” bin Laden announced.
He could not have imagined just how closely and how long America’s leaders would hue to his plan, conducting commando raids, drone strikes, armed interventions, and outright wars in Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and elsewhere. Nor could Al Qaeda’s leader have foreseen how deep into financial ruin the U.S. would sink as a result.
Bin Laden’s 2004 trillion-dollar boast wasn’t actually accurate. The U.S. federal deficit was just $413 billion in 2004. But it wouldn’t remain that low for long. America’s post-9/11 wars have now cost or caused long-term obligations to taxpayers of an astonishing $8 trillion, according to a 2021 analysis by Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
And Trump has continued to expand America’s ruinous foreign interventions from Ecuador to Iran. An Intercept analysis found that Trump has presided over more than 20 armed conflicts and wars during his two terms in office. And the costs continue adding up. Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce and currently a public policy professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, previously told The Intercept that the excessive expenses of the Iran war, alone, would likely reach into the trillions of dollars. And Trump is also currently pushing for a post-World War II record $1.6 trillion Pentagon budget for next year.
In case you hadn’t guessed, the pre-9/11 projection that the national debt would be paid off in 2009 never came to pass. Instead, the Bush and Trump presidencies were marked by massive tax cuts that mostly benefited corporations and the wealthiest Americans, depriving the Treasury of almost $10 trillion in expected revenue.
So after bin Laden’s attack; the forever wars of Bush, Barack Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden; and Trump’s contributions in disastrous conflicts and gross fiscal mismanagement, the $5.8 trillion national debt of 2001 has now ballooned by 590 percent to a staggering $40 trillion. That’s $1 million, 40 million times over.
About 50 percent of the debt has been accrued since Donald Trump was first elected. This week, Trump pledged to pay every American adult $5,000 if Republicans keep control of Congress in November, which would cost more than $1 trillion. And that $128 billion budget surplus from 2001? It’s been replaced by a projected federal budget deficit for this fiscal year of $2.1 trillion. This debt and deficit spiral is also occurring during a time of near-full employment when the government’s finances should actually be improving.
If bin Laden made it to paradise, as was his hope, he is no doubt smiling as the Trump administration dismisses the ballooning debt and the president peddles nonsensical claims that “growth will take care of that very easily.” The U.S. will actually spend more than $1 trillion this year just paying interest on the debt. The Peterson Foundation projects that total interest payments will more than double over the next decade — and that may be an undercount. And even if the debt remained steady at $40 trillion and the United States were to pay down $1 million per day, it would take almost 110,000 years to pay it off.
All this debt is also likely to keep interest rates high, raising the cost of mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, and small business credit, hurting ordinary Americans. High deficits and debt — particularly if coupled with high inflation or interest rates — make it harder for the government to respond to crises like a recession, depression, pandemic, or other emergency.
Then there is the weakened safety net that comes from deficits and debt. Bin Laden doesn’t need to worry about his golden years, and Trump is living them right now at taxpayer expense. But in 2032 — just six years from now — the Social Security trust fund is on track to go bust, to take one example of shortfalls on the horizon. By law, when the trust fund hits zero, all retirees’ benefits are mandated to drop by more than 20 percent.
Looking Back, I’ve come to think of the acrid odor of the collapsed Twin Towers as more than a mélange of burning paper, glass, concrete, and around 70 carcinogens. It was, instead, a harbinger of something even darker than the nearly 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11 — a long road of death and destruction stretching out into the future, beyond the vanishing point.
Even Bin Laden couldn’t have imagined long-term lethality of his attacks. Close to 9,700 first responders, survivors, and those who helped to clear nearly 1.8 million tons of debris at the World Trade Center have died of illnesses tied to 9/11, according to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. And more than 57,000 first responders and others have been diagnosed with 9/11-linked cancers. Around 155,000 people have enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program, which provides care and health monitoring to people who were exposed to toxic air after 9/11. And an estimated 400,000 people were exposed to toxic contaminants, the risk of physical injury, and physically and emotionally stressful conditions in the days, weeks, and months following the attacks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The vengeful war on the world that bin Laden managed to provoke has proved even more devastating than the effects of the toxic stew we inhaled near Ground Zero. An estimated 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere between 2001 and 2023, alone. Another 3.6 to 3.8 million people are estimated to have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the toll to at least 4.5 million dead and counting. This quarter century of carnage and all that it unleashed has left the U.S. hollowed out and rotting from within; a deterioration in every conceivable measure from economics to democratic ideals to the spiritual health of the nation.
Bin Laden’s bleed-until-bankruptcy plan was designed to sink America’s economy — and it continues to work to great effect. And by ushering in the presidencies of Donald Trump, bin Laden left the United States morally bankrupt, too. Twenty-five years after 9/11, the country is a pale shadow of the superpower that emerged from World War II having been laid low not by the Soviet Union — the nuclear-armed power it long considered an existential threat — but by two trust-fund terrorists: the scions of a Saudi construction empire, and an outer borough New York City real estate developer, respectively.
“The wise man doesn’t squander his security, wealth, and children for the sake of the liar in the White House,” bin Laden said in 2004, referring to Bush. He likely couldn’t have imagined America choosing an even more inveterate liar, an even greater intellectual lightweight, and an even more ruinous president. A quarter century after 9/11, it’s clear that bin Laden won. But the victory was not his alone. And, in the end, his role in it turned out to be vanishingly small. Bush, Cheney, Obama, and Biden, as well as a raft of politicians, government functionaries, and all who went along with the madness unleashed by the attacks, played key roles in helping hobble the U.S. in the 25 years since the September 11. But it’s been Trump, more than anyone else, who has made bin Laden’s lofty 9/11 dreams America’s never-ending nightmare.
Please go here for the original article: https://theintercept.com/2026/09/11/bin-laden-september-11-trump-america/
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