“I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.” — Osama bin Laden (October 2001)
“GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES.” — President Donald Trump (September 2026)
By John and Nisha Whitehead*
Days before the 25th anniversary of 9/11, President Trump flooded his Truth Social account with AI-generated fantasies of himself commanding armies of giant, red-eyed robots. In one, Trump strides through a darkened Washington surrounded by robotic soldiers beneath the words, “THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN.” Another declares, “THEY WILL DREAM OF US FOREVER.” A third depicts Trump seated on a mechanical throne, surrounded by an army of robots and the presidential seal, beneath the warning: “GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES.”
Twenty-five years after 9/11, one has to ask: has the nightmare ever really ended?
For a quarter-century, Americans have been governed by fear: fear of terrorists and foreign enemies, fear of domestic extremists and political opponents, fear of the next attack, the next crisis, the next emergency.
That fear has given us endless war, mass surveillance, militarized police, secret courts, indefinite detention, government watchlists, domestic military deployments and an imperial presidency armed with powers that would have been unthinkable before 9/11.
That is where America’s two great anniversaries of 2026 collide. On July 4, America celebrated 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, born from a revolt against King George III and a system in which too much power rested in the hands of one ruler. At its heart was the radical proposition that government derives its just powers from the consent of the people.
On September 11, we mark 25 years since the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, shattered the nation’s sense of security, and set in motion a massive expansion of presidential, military and national-security power.
America began by rebelling against a king. Two hundred and fifty years later, we have created a presidency with increasingly king-like powers.
To understand how we arrived at this dangerous moment, we have to go back to the moment when fear gave the government permission to begin dismantling the restraints on its power. That trail leads inevitably back to 9/11.
Whatever the truth about what the government knew before 9/11, there can be little dispute about what the government did afterward. It used the attacks and the fear they generated to radically expand its powers over the American people.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the “war on terror” has become a war without end, the emergency has become permanent, the surveillance state has become omnipresent, the police have become militarized, and the presidency has accumulated powers that would have horrified the revolutionaries of 1776.
What did 25 years of surrendering liberty in exchange for security actually buy us? Not peace. Not security. Not fiscal stability. Not a less intrusive government.
Instead, we got the Patriot Act and mass surveillance; secret courts and government watchlists; indefinite detention and torture; militarized police; endless wars and trillions in debt; and a presidency increasingly untethered from Congress, the courts and constitutional restraint.
And still the government insists it needs more power to keep us safe. That is the trap. Twenty-five years later, the emergency never ended—it became the government.
The USA Patriot Act, rushed through Congress just 45 days after the 9/11 attacks, dramatically expanded the government’s powers, weakened safeguards against government overreach, and opened the door to far-reaching surveillance of the American people. What was sold to us as a temporary response to terrorism became the foundation for something much larger.
Every president since has inherited the machinery of the post-9/11 national-security state. Every president has found new ways to use it. And almost none of the powers claimed in the name of emergency have ever been willingly surrendered.
George W. Bush gave us the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, torture, indefinite detention and preemptive war. Barack Obama expanded the drone wars, normalized targeted killings and presided over an increasingly sophisticated surveillance apparatus. Successive administrations embraced secret watchlists, warrantless data collection and sweeping executive authority.
Donald Trump did not create this machinery. He inherited it.
Nowhere is the danger more apparent than in the return to preemptive war. Not content to wage war against Afghanistan after 9/11, the United States invaded Iraq under a preemptive war doctrine that embraced striking threats before they were fully formed.
The consequences were catastrophic: lives lost, trillions squandered, regions destabilized, terrorist movements radicalized, and the constitutional power to decide when the nation goes to war steadily transferred from Congress to the president.
Twenty-five years after 9/11 plunged the United States into a cycle of preemptive war, blowback and permanent emergency, President Trump has launched another preemptive war against Iran without a declaration of war by Congress.
The circle is complete. 9/11 gave us the War on Terror. The War on Terror gave us permanent emergency. Permanent emergency gave us the imperial presidency. And the imperial presidency has given us another war.
War has become the permanent business of the American empire. The military-industrial complex profits. Defense contractors prosper. Politicians posture. Presidents accumulate power. The American people get the bill.
The post-9/11 wars have cost trillions, killed or displaced millions, and scarred generations of servicemen and women. Every new conflict creates the justification for still more military spending, secrecy, emergency powers and government control.
War abroad has a way of coming home.
After 9/11, the government embraced torture in the name of national security. Abu Ghraib demonstrated what happens when human beings are reduced to enemy combatants and government agents are told the normal rules no longer apply.
That battlefield mindset did not remain overseas. Local police departments acquired armored vehicles, military weapons, tactical gear and battlefield training. SWAT teams became routine instruments of law enforcement. Military surveillance tools became tools for monitoring ordinary Americans.
The language changed, too. Citizens became “suspects.” Communities became “threat environments.” Protesters became potential extremists. The homeland became a battlefield.
The result is a country in which the dividing line between soldier and police officer, battlefield and neighborhood, foreign enemy and domestic suspect has become dangerously blurred.
The same vicious cycle has played out with surveillance. The Patriot Act normalized mass surveillance. Technology has since made the machinery exponentially more powerful.
Today, government agencies no longer need someone following you in an unmarked car to create detailed records of where Americans travel, whom they visit and how they live. Your phone tells them. Your car tells them. License plate readers tell them. Facial recognition cameras tell them. Your purchases, internet searches, social-media activity, location history and digital communications fill in the rest.
Yet the deeper problem is that we stopped insisting that government obey the same laws it imposes on us. Once “national security” became an acceptable excuse for warrantless surveillance, torture, indefinite detention, secret courts and undeclared wars, the exception began swallowing the rule.
Congress surrendered authority. Presidents seized it. Courts deferred. The public became accustomed to government officials acting first and answering questions later.
This failure transcends political parties. Republicans cheered executive power under Republican presidents. Democrats cheered it under Democratic presidents. Then both sides expressed shock when those powers were turned against them.
Powers do not remain partisan. Surveillance powers created to catch terrorists are used against Americans. Emergency powers become tools of ordinary government. Military powers migrate into domestic policing. Executive powers tolerated under one president become precedents for the next.
And once government acquires a weapon, it rarely gives it back.
The Founders did not assume that every president would be wise, rational, restrained or benevolent. They divided power precisely because human beings cannot be trusted with too much of it.
A free people cannot make their liberties dependent upon the judgment, temperament or sanity of a single ruler. Yet for 25 years, under presidents of both parties, we have systematically weakened those restraints while strengthening the presidency.
Trump’s fitness to exercise the immense powers of his office cannot be separated from the larger question of why any president should possess so much unilateral power in the first place.
That brings us back to the nightmare. Fear has always been the fuel of the police state.
Keep people frightened enough, divided enough and distrustful enough of one another, and they will beg the government to protect them—even when the price of that protection is their freedom.
That bargain has defined post-9/11 America.
The government seized our freedoms, but the assurance of safety never materialized. Instead, the emergencies multiplied: Terrorism. War. Pandemic. Immigration. Crime. Civil unrest. Political extremism.
Each crisis becomes another justification for government power. Each new power establishes another precedent. Each precedent becomes another weapon waiting for the next president to wield it.
If constitutional government is to survive, Congress must reclaim the powers it has surrendered. The courts must stop treating “national security” as a magic phrase capable of making constitutional violations disappear. The machinery of mass surveillance must be dismantled. Domestic militarization must be rolled back. Emergency powers must be temporary, narrow and subject to meaningful oversight.
And the American people must stop allowing fear to dictate the boundaries of their freedom.
Twenty-five years ago, Osama bin Laden predicted that the American government would lead its own people into “an unbearable hell and a choking life.” Bin Laden did not defeat America. He did not destroy the Constitution. We are doing that ourselves.
Every time we accept another surveillance program because we’re afraid, the Fourth Amendment dies a little more. Every time we tolerate another war because we’re told it will make us safe, constitutional restraints on war-making die a little more.
Every time we shrug and tell ourselves that the latest encroachment on liberty is temporary, necessary or would only be used against someone else, the Constitution dies a little more.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the question is no longer whether terrorism poses the greatest threat to our freedoms. The question is whether the American Police State itself has become the greater threat.
America has spent 250 years proclaiming its freedom and the past 25 years building the machinery with which to extinguish it.
Two anniversaries. One reckoning.
America must decide what it intends to be: a republic governed by the rule of law or an empire governed by permanent war, permanent surveillance and permanent emergency.
We cannot be both.
The choice we make will determine nothing less than the survival of the American experiment in freedom.
About the authors
*John W. Whitehead is a constitutional attorney and author, and founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute.
