The Guardian has documented six lies that United States President Donald Trump is spreading about Al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on 11th September 2001:
The Trump Towers as the now tallest building in New York City.
Being involved in Ground Zero’s clean up.
Spreading anti-Muslim rumours.
Targeting Democrat politician Ilhan Omar.
Claiming to have predicted the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Messing up details about firefighters and other emergency workers.
These six lies are illustrative of the afterlives or the memory turn in September 11 studies. I first realised this when I saw Richard Beck’s book Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life (New York: Verso, 2025). Memory studies are a viable trend in historiography—which I had previously encountered in core terrorism studies, and in various books on how and why the Cold War ended. The latter was driven by historians like John Lewis Gaddis and Richard Ned Lebow who gained access to new archives and primary source data from different sides of the Cold War conflict.
In contrast, the afterlives / memory turn in September 11 studies is driven primarily by two trends. The first trend is the intergenerational transformation of population demographics in the United States and elsewhere for Millennials, Generation Z, and the new Generation Alpha. These younger generations have displaced the now largely forgotten Generation X (my generation), and the still dominant Baby Boomers. The second trend is that generational cohort amnesia (or simple lack of direct knowledge due to being either very young or not being born at all during the September 11 attacks) provides a knowledge gap for streaming media, digital marketing, and publisher firms to create consumer products and services for the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Netflix’s Turning Point: Generation 9/11 (2026) is a key example of these synergies (official trailer below). The documentary explores how the September 11 attacks have influenced United States culture and politics - from the domestic rise of homeland security to US involvement in the Forever Wars of Iraq and Afghanistan.
This transforms how we understand September 11 as a terrorist event.
The initial aftermath focused on proximate (near) and synchronic (present) aspects: the strategic surprise of the attacks; the stochastic shock of the fallout; and the volatility that shifted the United States away from the values and worldviews at the time that were still emerging from the 2000 United States election, the 2000 Dotcom financial crash, and high-profile corporate collapses that included Enron Corporation and Worldcom. These involved “images of the future” (Fred Polak) that were now “de-futured” (Jose M. Ramos) at the “myth/metaphor” (Sohail Inayatullah) or "daemonic” levels of (ontological) reality (Don Webb, Plato).
The afterlives / memory turn in September 11 studies takes us into a very different timeframe: distal (far away) and diachronic (through-time). Memory of what actually happened, how, and why becomes very important. Reliable primary sources from the initial historical time period of proximate and synchronic events and repercussions are now replaced by secondary source reconstructions and tertiary source noise. Therefore, source evaluation and other research and evaluation skills that are taught in cognitive psychology, strategic intelligence studies, political psychology, and historiography become vital. This knowledge base applies to Open Source Intelligence and to other data sources (from commercial to classified or clandestine / covert originated).
There is a body of work in political psychology which deals specifically with why President Trump would spread lies about the September 11 attacks. The late political scientist Robert Jervis pioneered much of this work in international relations during the 1970s period of detente negotiations between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Of his many works, How Statesmen Think: The Psychology of International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017) is a now canonical text. For Jervis, President Trump’s lies are successful in weaponising our human emotions and group-based affiliative identities. His lies are structured cognitively to self-convince people about beliefs, stereotypes, values and worldviews that they are already highly likely to hold.
The lies seem outlandish to President Trump’s critics—in very obvious ways. That’s not their point, Jervis would argue today. Their function as sociological propaganda is to bind together the identified in-group or voter bloc of (what now would be known as MAGA movement) loyalists. People self-convince themselves (the masses). Such groups may be identified via demographic, psychographic, sentiment, positioning, and digital marketing approaches that have long been part of the Values & Lifestyles Survey tradition (the consulting, marketing, and the political elite). In order to work effectively, there needs to be information and knowledge asymmetries between these two different groups that maintain the elite-mass “power over” / structural relationship.
The realist school of John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato offers a contrasting explanation to Robert Jervis. In their book How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023), Mearsheimer and Rosato suggest that Westphalian nation-states in terms of their foreign policy will largely act in rational ways. They dismiss much of international relations work to date on this, including rational choice—an influential school of thought from the 1970s and the 1980s that emerged from think tanks like the RAND Corporation based in Santa Monica, California.
For Mearsheimer and Rosato, political scientists mostly still don’t understand what true rationality actually is. Their solution? Develop credible theories based on empirical observation of the real world: what people and strategic actors actually do (realism) versus a normative shift from present state to future state that you wish to bring about (idealism). President Trump’s lies also reflect an earlier tradition used by President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger of Madman Theory: appearing to be irrational in order to convince, influence, and to shape potential enemies and adversaries.
Here is a lecture by the late Robert Jervis on his political psychology informed approach.
Here is John Mearsheimer at the Cato Institute on his realist informed approach.
What we see here is the asperspectival / multiperspectival approach of combining (or at least being open to exploring) a range of viewpoints. This differs to being fused with a single point of view—which you believe has the answer. It is found in multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, causal mechanism (process tracing), and Bayesian oriented methodological approaches.
With this in mind we can now return to President Trump’s six lies about September 11.
Lie 1 is credibility based.
Lie 2 is credibility based.
Lie 3 targets an out-group stereotype (in order to strengthen in-group identity).
Lie 4 deploys or weaponises this out-group stereotype to target an individual politician.
Lie 5 is credibility based.
Lie 6 is credibility based.
Critics of President Trump often pre-frame him as being either irrational or dangerous. This belief is central also to those critics who believe that President Trump is a fascist—a complex debate in which shifting definitions have now affected inclusion / selection criteria (this may become clear if you read earlier waves of political science research in fascism studies, notably from the 1960s to the early 1990s, and from varied authorial and ideological based viewpoints). A more focused and credible version of this claim is that President Trump is enacting a socially learned version of the Nixon / Kissinger era Madman Theory - which he learned in the 1970s and 1980s in New York City’s real estate market, whilst working with Bear Stearns chief executive officer Alan C. Greenberg, who provided financing for many of President Trump’s property / real estate investments.
If you view these six lies via a Jervis / Mearsheimer / Rosato informed lens then its strategic rationality becomes more readily apparent. President Trump is openly manipulating public awareness of the September 11 terrorist attacks in order to strengthen his credibility. This is for what likely are egoistic and status-driven personality structure and psychological drives. The status-driven dynamics mean that President Trump has to be dominant; and his targets are dominated via targeted pre-framing and social influence. Muslims and progressive Democrat politician Ilhan Omar are scapegoats: sacrificial victims who are expendable.
This attack PR is agenda-setting (Steven Lukes) and has occurred in US domestic politics in various historical waves that include the 1920s anti-anarchist, 1950s anticommunist, 1980s sociological conflict, 1990s criminal deterrence, and 2001-2021 era Forever Wars that resulted from the George W. Bush administration’s grand strategy the Global War on Terror. President Trump has just mastered it—honing it beyond his mentor Roy Cohn in the formative historical period of Wall Street deal-making in the 1980s and the 1990s.
Finally, this can also be understood very well in terms of John Nash Jr’s development of specific dominance strategies in noncooperative game theory. President Trump is highly adversarial. He manipulates the afterlives / memory turn of the September 11 terrorist attacks for his own personal advantage. This is extractive and rentier based: the dominant mode of how leverage based financialisation actually works in property and real estate transactions (for that specific investment asset class). It is the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey equation on steroids. President Trump is the dominant; his targets are the dominated. It’s always an outcome in his favour. That’s also the strategic rationality.
Tomorrow, I will reflect on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.