11 September: the split screen in Dallas, Trump and Bush. A soulless mess

Dallas, 9 September 2026, American Airlines Centre: the current President of the United States, Donald Trump, addresses the Republican Party convention ahead of the mid-term elections – an unprecedented event, which Fox News, with its usual restraint, describes as the ‘Trumpapalooza convention’, though it is by no means exaggerating. The President spoke for two hours; the American media’s summary of his speech boils down to one sentence of his: ‘Just assume my name is on the ballot paper.’ Trump always and only relies on Trump; it is his game plan, his perennial gamble. He has two resounding presidential election victories to give him confidence, and he says brazenly: ‘Usually, the party of the incumbent president doesn’t win mid-term elections, but we’ll change that tradition.’ Then he goes off the cuff – with difficulty, in a frenzy – with his favourite talking points, his lies: the 2020 election that he won, the tariffs that are making Americans extraordinarily wealthy, the wars he has won (including the one against Iran), his being the victim of media persecution, New Mexico becoming ‘New America’, the Strait of Hormuz becoming the ‘Strait of Trump’, and the communist Democrats leading the country to ruin. And then the prize – five thousand dollars for every American if the Republican Party wins in November, a trillion dollars and more as a reward – it fell to his deputy, J. D. Vance, who hates to contradict his boss, to then say that perhaps the ‘dividend’ won’t be for all Americans and that the expenditure is covered by tariff revenues (unconstitutional, but let’s not split hairs).

Dallas, 9 September 2026, the George W. Bush Presidential Library: the former president speaks for just under half an hour about 11 September 2001 alongside Condoleezza Rice, his then Secretary of State, at the opening of an exhibition commemorating the victims of the Twin Towers attack a quarter of a century ago. Bush recalls those moments; Rice says it was the only time she raised her voice at the president, telling him to get into a bunker and not move from there.

Bush was visiting a school in Nebraska and wanted to return to Washington. ‘We’re under attack,’ said Rice, ‘stay where you are.’ And Bush replied: ‘Of course, you’re right, but I’m not going to hide here.’ ‘I thought that if I’d stayed there, I’d be conceding a psychological victory to those who were attacking us, so I went back.’ Whilst recounting the hours and days following the attack on New York, Bush added: “I didn’t want us to lose our soul; I wanted people, whilst defending our freedom, to remember just how precious it is.” Bush does not follow social media; he says he is not interested in conspiracy theories and does not understand them. We may have overreacted, but at the time we thought we were doing the right thing, and finally: “From time to time, this country goes through periods of isolationism where we think: we have too many domestic problems; why should we care about what’s happening out there? To me, that means failing to heed the lessons of 11 September; what happens far from America affects our security here.”

The ‘Dallas’ double bill presents two conservative presidents twenty-five years apart: one, the incumbent, who speaks of himself; the other, who speaks of the soul of America; one who exudes lies and conspiracy theories from every pore, the other who admits painful truths; one who identifies the enemy as his political rival, the other who regards Americans – every single one of them – as precious, to be protected, alongside the peoples fighting for their freedom; one who incites, divides, mocks and humiliates; the other who recalls having visited a mosque after the Islamist attack, because he was not angry with Islam, but with the terrorists. Of the many things that have changed over these twenty-five years, what seems to have been irretrievably lost is the sense of solidarity, humanity and unity of that time, which is now unthinkable in an America that has, in the end, lost its soul, but also in our disordered West, where we can no longer even agree on the minimal yet powerful collective interest of freedom.