Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Donald Trump has inflicted more damage on the United States’s markets than did Usam Bin Laden and al-Qaeda on 9/11.
The attacks of that date caused the US financial authorities to to close down the NYSE and the Nasdaq for a week, until September 17. This was unprecedented.
When trading resumed that week of September 17, 2001, Marc Davis explains at Investopedia, over the following five days, the Dow Jones average decreased more than 14%, the S&P 500 tumbled 11.6% and Nasdaq fell a whopping 16%. The attacks wiped $1.4 trillion of value off the US markets. Even just the first day of trading after the attacks, the DJIA plummeted 684 points, down 7.1%. At the time, that was the largest loss for a single trading session in the whole history of the exchange.
Graph of DJIA September 1, 2001 to October 1, 2001. ChatGPT.
Trump’s crackpot tariffs have wiped $5 trillion of the value of US markets and that appears only to be the beginning.
Even abroad, trading was halted today (Monday) in Japan after shares on the Nikkei 225 fell nearly nearly 8%. This is 9/11- level carnage.
On September 11, 2001, a small group of terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center twin towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. One thing was sure. They wanted to inflict the maximum damage on the United States.
Al-Qaeda militants were driven by a form of Third Worldism, convinced that the US superpower was impoverishing people by taking their petroleum and other resources for pennies on the dollar, using bullying tactics to talk down the price of energy to benefit its own economy. They saw the US as a bulwark of dictatorships in the region, including in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. They bitterly resented the Israeli occupation of the Muslim holy city of Jerusalem, with its threat to the al-Aqsa Mosque complex, the third holiest site for Muslims. But despite their adoption of an Islamic veneer, the religious tradition of the Prophet Muhammad, the Qur’an, and high ethics and philosophy did not drive them. Indeed, many were lawless young men seeking a James Bond lifestyle, visiting strip clubs and bars, buying golden cigarette lighters, and justifying their libertinism on the grounds that they were sacrificing for a higher cause. Bin Laden admitted that they were “not like other Muslims,” by which he likely meant that they were antinomians and did not consider themselves under the law. The monstrous act of terror that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people, including Muslims, was strictly forbidden in Islamic law. They did not care about Muslim ethical principles. They constructed a cult for themselves in which they had drunk the Koolaid and were determined to pour it down the throats of thousands of others.
I spent many years studying al-Qaeda and telling anyone who would listen how I thought it could be defeated. I regularly went out for consulting in Washington, D.C. and am proud of those efforts. Most of its grievances were based on errors of fact or interpretation or both. And anyway, those grievances could not be addressed through mass violence. After the horrific attacks, none of situations about which al-Qaeda gave lip service improved. Political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan found that in the past century, peaceful social movements were twice as likely to succeed as violent ones. But I did feel as though I came to understand the hideous, crackpot ideology of the al-Qaeda leaders.
Al-Qaeda in my view was always overblown. It never consisted of more than a few tens of thousands of militants, and most of them were not very competent. It was always doomed to defeat because it was a small organization and was hated by most Muslims and certainly by their elites. Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Algeria all pitched in to wipe it out.
“TrumpZilla,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / ChatGPT, 2025
In contrast, and although he is from my own culture, I have no idea what Trump thinks he is doing. He says he wants to rejigger global trade so as to bring industry back to the United States. But you could have done that just by setting tax law to punish American corporations that move offshore. Either he is just bonkers or he is fixated on a few false premises about the way the world economy works.
Trump’s assault on civil liberties, scientific and medical research, universities, and freedom of thought and conscience are even deadlier than the economic damage he is doing. And, of course, these un-American activities will also do economic damage on a large scale.
Trump is an agent of destruction for American society and poses a threat far more deadly than al-Qaeda ever did.
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