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Donald Trump Wants You to Put on a Sweater
Is Trump the new Jimmy Carter?
One of the most striking things about the days and months after 9/11 was how little the government asked of us.
If you’re old enough, you no doubt remember watching the horrors of those attacks unfold on live television. It instantly felt like a historical turning point. Talking heads on TV made constant comparisons to Pearl Harbor, a moment that propelled the United States into a war effort that cost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives.
The nation was united in outrage and sorrow — united, we now know, for the last time in the last quarter century. Pundits wondered how George W. Bush would use this surge of patriotism to better the country and fight its foes. Would there be a draft for the wars that were on the horizon? Would Bush require young people to enroll in a national service corps to improve the country? In those fall days of 2001, I kept waiting to be asked to do something. What role would I play in defeating the scourge of global terrorism?
But George W. Bush never asked me for much. He asked me to report suspicious activity to the authorities, I guess. He asked me to look the other way while the executive branch hoarded power and took away the civil liberties of people it suspected were up to no good. But mostly he…
