Tag: Bush

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From Political Poison to Political Permission: The GOP’s 9/11 “Truther” Transformation

As America approaches the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, one of the more striking changes in our politics is not what happened on that terrible morning, but what has happened to the politics surrounding it. On the September 9, 2026 edition of MSNOW’s All In with Chris Hayes, Hayes examined what he portrayed as a remarkable Republican metamorphosis: ideas once treated on the right as career-ending “9/11 truther” conspiracies are now being entertained publicly by prominent Republicans. The episode itself advertised a report on “the 9/11 truther sitting in the United States Senate,” making the contrast between then and now the centerpiece of the segment.

The most illuminating historical example is Van Jones. In 2009, Jones was serving in the Obama administration as a special adviser on green jobs when conservative media—most prominently Glenn Beck—hammered him over his name appearing on a 2004 petition associated with the 9/11 Truth movement. Beck went considerably further, claiming Jones believed the Bush administration had “blew up the World Trade Center and covered it up.” PolitiFact later rated that characterization only Half True: Jones’s name did appear on the petition, but the document called for further investigation and raised questions about whether officials might have allowed the attacks to happen; it did not say Bush officials blew up the towers. Jones repudiated the petition’s implications, saying they did not represent his views, and his name was subsequently removed. The controversy was not the only issue dogging Jones—his past political activism and other inflammatory remarks were also under fire—but amid that broader conservative campaign, he resigned from the White House.

That history makes Sen. Ron Johnson’s more recent rhetoric remarkable. In April 2025, the Wisconsin Republican discussed 9/11 on a podcast, questioned the accepted explanation for the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, suggested it may have been a “controlled demolition,” and spoke of pursuing Senate hearings. Johnson, who chaired the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, also suggested that the government knew more about 9/11 than it had disclosed. These are not fringe comments from an anonymous internet poster; they came from a sitting United States senator with investigative authority. Yet Johnson did not experience anything resembling the immediate political exile that association with the “truther” movement could produce in the post-9/11 political era.

There is an important qualification to Hayes’s comparison. The Van Jones controversy cannot fairly be reduced to only 9/11: conservatives were simultaneously attacking his previous radical politics and controversial remarks, and Jones’s precise connection to the petition was disputed. Likewise, Johnson says he is asking questions and seeking evidence, rather than simply adopting every claim associated with the sprawling 9/11 Truth movement. And questioning government findings is not inherently illegitimate. But the political contrast remains difficult to miss. In 2009, merely being linked to a petition that raised conspiratorial questions about 9/11 helped make a White House official politically radioactive. Sixteen years later, a Republican senator could himself publicly raise one of the movement’s signature theories—controlled demolition of Building 7—and contemplate congressional investigation.

That may be the most fascinating takeaway from Hayes’s segment as September 11, 2026 approaches. The underlying evidence about the attacks has not undergone some comparable revolution; the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s investigation concluded that uncontrolled fires caused the progressive collapse of Building 7, not explosives. What has unmistakably changed is the political ecosystem in which conspiratorial claims circulate. Glenn Beck once wielded the “truther” label as a devastating indictment against Van Jones. Today, Ron Johnson can venture into territory once considered politically toxic and remain a powerful senator. Twenty-five years after 9/11, perhaps the story is not simply that conspiracy theories survived. It is that the political price for entertaining them has changed dramatically—and, depending on who is doing the entertaining, may barely exist at all.

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A Provocative Claim About Presidential Responsibility

In a striking segment on MSNOW’s The Last Word, host Lawrence O’Donnell argued that Donald Trump is the only American president whose peacetime policies have resulted in more deaths than those occurring under his wartime actions. The claim immediately ignited fierce debate. Supporters of Trump dismissed it as hyperbolic political theater, while critics said it merely put numbers to what they see as the lethal consequences of policy choices.

To be precise, the argument is not that Trump personally “killed” anyone, but that decisions made under his administration produced deadly outcomes. O’Donnell’s central focus was the sweeping DOGE cuts, which he contends slashed critical foreign aid programs and humanitarian assistance. According to the segment, those reductions led to food shortages and medical supply disruptions in vulnerable regions—particularly in parts of sub-Saharan Africa—contributing to starvation deaths, interruptions in HIV treatment, and preventable fatalities among infants and immunocompromised patients. The broader moral claim is straightforward: when the United States withdraws life-sustaining aid at scale, the consequences are measured in lives lost.

O’Donnell’s case draws added force from history. For decades, humanitarian aid to Africa enjoyed bipartisan backing. Republican President George W. Bush, for example, earned praise for expanding anti-HIV/AIDS initiatives that saved millions of lives. By that standard, O’Donnell suggests the Trump-era retrenchment marked not just a policy shift but a break from a rare area of cross-party moral consensus.

A related point, not specifically raised by O’Donnell but relevant to the broader debate, is that the United States continues to provide substantial aid to strategic allies such as Israel. That reality complicates a blanket “America First” defense of foreign aid reductions, since it suggests the issue is less about ending foreign assistance altogether and more about where and to whom it is directed.

Critics of O’Donnell’s assertion counter that it stretches causation beyond responsible limits. Foreign aid systems are complex, involving NGOs, host governments, and multilateral institutions; attributing downstream deaths directly to a single administration’s budget decisions can oversimplify reality. They also argue that every president makes trade-offs and that fiscal restraint, even when painful, is not equivalent to intent to harm. Some pro-Trump voices further contend that global poverty, corruption, and logistical failures—rather than U.S. policy alone—bear primary responsibility for humanitarian crises. From this vantage point, labeling Trump as uniquely deadly in peacetime risks politicizing tragedy.

Yet supporters of O’Donnell’s framing respond that intent is not the only moral metric—foreseeability matters. If experts warned that cutting HIV medication pipelines or food assistance would predictably result in deaths, and those warnings were ignored, responsibility cannot be shrugged off as indirect. They also fold in the administration’s handling of COVID-19, arguing that inconsistent messaging, resistance to mitigation strategies, and delayed responses contributed to avoidable American deaths. When those domestic losses are considered alongside alleged foreign aid consequences, the cumulative toll becomes central to the debate.

Ultimately, O’Donnell’s claim sounds bombastic at first hearing. Comparing peacetime and wartime death tolls is inherently fraught, and presidential accountability for global mortality is complex. Still, given the scale of reported COVID fatalities and credible estimates that reductions in humanitarian aid can translate into hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, it is not unreasonable to argue that Trump-era policies may have produced an extraordinary peacetime human cost. One can dispute the framing, question the arithmetic, and challenge the causation—but it is no longer far-fetched to make the claim.