Senator Ron Johnson will regret mortgaging America’s integrity just for some time in the spotlight.
Ten years ago, as he embarked on his career in politics, Donald Trump tacitly endorsed the LIHOP theory of the 9/11 attacks.
At the time, you’d have had to be deep in conspiratorial weeds to know what that was. A decade hence, with paranoia the new coin of the realm, the outlines of that particular conspiracy theory are lamentably familiar to even the lay observer.
The allegation was made during a Twitter spat between Trump and Jeb Bush. “At the debate, you said your brother kept us safe,” Trump told the former Florida governor. “I wanted to be nice [and] did not mention the WTC came down during his watch, 9/11.” The future president continued: “You’re pathetic for saying nothing happened during your brother’s term when the World Trade Center was attacked and came down,” he wrote.
Reporters subsequently asked Trump to clarify his meaning. “You always have to look to the person at the top,” Trump said. “Do I blame George Bush? I only say that he was the president at the time, and you know, you could say the buck stops here.” Those who attend to such things were emboldened by the president’s rough articulation of a conspiracy theory of the 9/11 attacks, in which George W. Bush let it happen on purpose (LIHOP) — a more circumspect alternative to the notion that Bush made it happen on purpose (MIHOP).
Trump had granted some measure of legitimacy to an idea that was once exclusive to the left. Indeed, the theory’s evidentiary deficiencies could only be papered over by a partisan commitment to anti-Bush hostility. The notion that Bush could have prevented 9/11 but failed to act stems from a January 2001 memo authored by Richard Clarke, which was critical of the Clinton administration’s failure to degrade al-Qaeda. That, in combination with an August 2001 document warning that Osama bin Laden was exploring multiple avenues of attack against the U.S. homeland, lent credence to a narrative peddled by Democratic partisans. “Could the 9/11 attack have been stopped, had the Bush team reacted with urgency to the warnings contained in all of those daily briefs?” Vanity Fair editor Kurt Eichenwald asked. “We can’t ever know.”
And if those two memos were the sum total of the evidence of the Bush administration’s supposed laxity, the conspiracy theory could claim some retrospective validity. But the allegations raised by Democratic partisans were exhaustively investigated. In testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Clarke himself was asked if there was, in his estimation, the “remotest chance” that the reforms enacted after the September 11 attacks “would have prevented 9/11.” Clarke curtly replied, “No.”
The conspiracy theorists’ discovery process rarely uncovers that part. Indeed, the art of conspiracy theorizing involves working backward from a conclusion and selectively curating information to support that conclusion. To the extent that the Republican Party was host to practitioners of this art in 2015, they were relegated to the fringes. No longer. Today, the party has elevated conspiratorial thought and conspiracy theorists to positions of prominence. And yet Trump’s foray into 9/11 revisionism had attracted few Republican mimics — until this week.
“There are a host of questions that I will be asking, quite honestly, now that my eyes have been opened up,” Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson recently told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson. In the interview, the senator praised a 2020 film alleging that the official story of World Trade Center Building 7’s collapse is bunk. In addition, he called the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s investigation into that event a “corrupt” endeavor. “I don’t know if you can find structural engineers,” Johnson alleged, “that would say that thing didn’t come down in any other way than a controlled demolition.”
“What actually happened on 9/11? What do we know? What is being covered up?” the senator asked. “My guess is there’s an awful lot being covered up in terms of what the American government knows about 9/11.”
Johnson wasn’t merely seeking to validate his interlocutor’s neurotic priors. According to Politico, “a spokesperson for Johnson said the lawmaker is currently seeking information and documentation to hold hearings on the event nearly 25 years later.” That would be a duplicative exercise. The September 11 attacks are arguably the most extensively studied intelligence and engineering failures in U.S. history. They have been studied by executive agencies, media outlets, congressional inquiries, and blue-ribbon commissions. The paranoid notion that any of the buildings that came down that day in lower Manhattan were deliberately collapsed has been debunked and debunked again.
Johnson’s suggestion that there are not just unanswered questions about the attacks but unasked questions is unsupportable. In much the same way that the JFK files disappointed the conspiracy theorists, Johnson’s abuse of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations’ time will likely produce a letdown. The conclusion from which 9/11 theorists work backward is that the United States is the true villain of the story. For almost a quarter of a century, enterprising freelancers have tried and failed to put meat on those bones. Still, their pursuit persists.
It is unusual for the elected stewards of America’s governing institutions to work so feverishly toward undermining their own legitimacy. Institutional stewardship tends to take a backseat to personal aggrandizement these days. For his part, Ron Johnson has made his priorities clear. But if his thoughtlessness helps swell the ranks of the Americans who have lost faith in their country’s fundamental decency and worth, the senator will regret mortgaging America’s integrity just for some time in the spotlight. If he doesn’t, we will.