Confidence in presidency falls to 27% from 55% in 2003

Ten of twelve elections since 9/11 produced partisan turnover

Within three days of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the House and Senate approved a sweeping authorization for the use of force against those responsible by a combined vote of 518 to 1. A Wall Street Journal poll recorded an 82% approval rating for President George W. Bush, who had not won the popular vote in the election that brought him to office less than a year earlier. Almost three-quarters of Americans told pollsters the country was on the right track.

Eleven days after the attacks, the White House created the Office of Homeland Security to coordinate intelligence and national-security agencies and lessen the chances the country would again be taken by surprise. Republican and Democratic lawmakers worked together on a bipartisan commission to investigate the causes of the attack. Young Americans enlisted in the military to fight what observers soon likened to a second world war. America’s NATO allies invoked Article 5 of the alliance charter for the first and only time in the organization’s history, treating the attack on the United States as an attack on all member states. Russian leader Vladimir Putin sent the United States a sculpture as a memorial.

Seib identifies the mechanics of government reorganization as the first point where post-attack unity began to erode. Converting the new White House office into a Cabinet department coordinating 22 agencies became partisan. Democrats wanted employees of the new department to be able to unionize; Republicans did not, and campaign operatives ran ads accusing Democrats of opposing national security.

The next division, according to Seib, opened over interrogation. Bush administration officials authorized harsh techniques against terror suspects. Republicans generally defended them as essential in a shadowy conflict; Democrats generally viewed them as excessive and a violation of the standards of behavior to which the country should aspire.

The divide widened, according to Seib, with the vote to authorize force against Iraq. The resolution passed with 126 House Democrats voting against it, many charging that Republican hawks were using the terrorist threat as a pretext for a war against Saddam Hussein they had long wanted to fight. Bush declared victory after six weeks of fighting, only to concede later that the claims Iraq held weapons of mass destruction were wrong.

U.S. forces remained in low-level conflict in Iraq for two decades. President Barack Obama could not find an exit strategy from Afghanistan, nor could President Trump in his first term. President Joe Biden’s withdrawal was widely viewed as an embarrassment, Seib reports.

The cumulative effect, McInturff said, is a residue of public anger that still shapes today’s politics. “If there are remnants” of September 11 embedded in the American consciousness, “they are the memories of what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, the fatigue of no more endless wars,” the Republican pollster said.

Gallup polling cited in the analysis shows confidence in the presidency at 27% today, down from 55% in 2003. Confidence in Congress fell to 9% from 29% over the same period. Even the military, which Seib notes is normally insulated from political currents, has seen confidence decline over the past two decades.

The volatility has carried into elections. In 10 of the 12 national elections held since September 2001, control of at least one of the three main Washington institutions — the House, the Senate and the White House — changed partisan hands. By Seib’s count, only five of the previous 12 elections had produced comparable changes.

The political class now includes a significant number of veterans of the post-September 11 wars, and they have emerged among the most skeptical voices on new military commitments. Vice President JD Vance served with the Marines in Iraq and was, Seib reports, among the senior Trump administration aides least convinced about the current conflict with Iran. On the Democratic side, Representative Pat Ryan of New York, who served two combat tours in Iraq, recently led a group of 10 House veterans in taking a stand against the Iran campaign. After “trillions of dollars and countless deaths” in the earlier Middle East fights, “I refuse to let the country I love make those same mistakes again,” Ryan said in a statement quoted by the Journal.

The longer arc, Seib writes, traces from the anger of the post-September 11 period to the rise of the Make America Great Again movement. The oxygen feeding the MAGA forces, he argues, is the dissatisfaction with the political establishment that emerged in the years after the attacks. The events of September 11 “set in motion a pattern of fear and anger that took us in a sad new direction,” John Hamre, a former top defense official and longtime leader of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said.

The question Seib poses is whether that kind of unity could recur. Longtime nonpartisan analyst Charlie Cook is doubtful. “I don’t know what any president could do to get a job approval rating in the 70s,” Cook said. “There are too many partisans in either party who wouldn’t give a president of the opposition party the time of day.”

The country got a partial test six years ago during the COVID-19 outbreak, Seib notes — an initial rally followed by renewed partisan division. American politics moves in cycles, he writes, and McInturff argues against ruling out a future unifying figure. “Never say never about America,” the pollster said.

The good news, Seib concludes, is that the immediate post-September 11 response did succeed in preventing a repeat attack on U.S. soil, an outcome far from certain in the days after the planes struck.