9/11 Changed America — And Built Trump’s Playbook

You cannot understand the executive power Donald Trump is wielding today if you do not understand how 9/11 was used to create that power.

I have been perseverating on that truth in the lead-up to today’s 25-year anniversary of the terrorist attack that altered so much — including my own life. I remember that day well: I was working on Capitol Hill at my new job working for Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee. As a plane was heading for the Capitol complex, everyone made a mad dash for the exits. In the chaos, I found two familiar faces: my old boss, Bernie Sanders, and his chief of staff, Jeff Weaver. We made our way to a restaurant blocks away from the Capitol, where we learned the grim news that thousands of Americans had been murdered — and sensed that everything was about to change.

My job abruptly shifted away from debates over the Bush administration’s spending cuts and tax cuts to all things national security. The work became all about challenging the White House’s master plan to dupe America into the Iraq War and secretly build a massive surveillance apparatus that mimicked the terrifying panopticon depicted in the then-recent film Enemy Of The State . The incessant terrorist-coded scares — the anthrax attack, the shoe bomber, the D.C. sniper — gave me bouts of anxiety and insomnia, which were intensified by Vice President Dick Cheney’s constant apocalyptic War on Terror rhetoric aiming to justify his quest for evermore executive power.

As a young congressional staffer, I didn’t know what I now know after reporting our podcast Master Plan: The Kingmakers — namely, that Cheney’s post-9/11 rampage wasn’t an abrupt shift for him. On the contrary, it was the culmination of his life’s work concentrating what he himself called “monarchical” powers inside the White House. Indeed, as you will learn in Episode 5 of Master Plan , Cheney, as White House chief of staff, spearheaded the Ford administration’s efforts to thwart Congress’ post-Watergate strictures on presidential power. Then, as a congressman during the Iran-Contra scandal, he zealously defended the Reagan administration’s lawlessness.

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The new season of Master Plan uncovers the decades-long plot to build an all-powerful American presidency. From Richard Nixon’s downfall to Ronald Reagan’s legal revolution, Dick Cheney’s post-9/11 power grab to the the radical blueprint of Project 2025, the series traces how a fringe legal theory — the unitary executive — has been used to manipulate the machinery of the U.S. government.

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In the lead-up to the 2004 election, I published a series of articles reviewing some of the biggest lies Bush and Cheney had told to justify their executive power grabs. When, in 2004, America nonetheless rewarded the duo with a second term, I left Washington demoralized and disgusted.

But a few years later, I felt a bit of hope about an Obama administration that had promised to be an antidote to the imperial presidency Bush and Cheney had built. As you’ll hear in Episode 6 of Master Plan , candidate Barack Obama declared that “the biggest problems that we’re facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. And that’s what I intend to reverse.”

But as you’ll also hear, Obama’s administration cited post-9/11 terrorist threats to assert a power even Bush and Cheney never explicitly claimed: the power to create a “kill list” and order the extrajudicial execution of American citizens deemed national security threats.

Today, liberals often self-soothe by insisting that Trump’s unprecedented use and abuse of executive power is an anomaly. But whether launching an unauthorized bombing campaign in Iran, waging a drone war in the Caribbean, flooding Minneapolis with federal agents in a deadly immigration crackdown, or launching authoritarian attacks against his domestic political opponents, Trump is weaponizing powers made available to him by a multi-decade master plan executed by kingmakers who used the aftermath of 9/11 to accelerate their scheme.

Twenty-five years after that horrible day, Master Plan exists to expose that story through interviews with the insiders who witnessed and engineered the kingmaking firsthand. The series — which concludes next week — is premised on the belief that if we don’t want future presidents mimicking presidents’ past abuses of executive power, then we must know this history and learn from it.

Subscribe to the podcast by searching “Master Plan” in your podcast app, or going to MasterPlanPodcast.com