On the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it is worthwhile to consider how this event led to the presidency of Donald Trump. It could only have been a fantasist’s dream in 2001.

The attacks orchestrated by Osama bin Laden resulted in the deaths of roughly 3,000 people. The attacks — captured live on television, a post-modern “spectacle” as defined by the French theorist Guy Debord — pierced the American myth of invincibility and shocked America’s collective psyche.

President George W. Bush’s twin response to the attacks — the Iraq and Afghan wars — salved the American people’s immediate thirst for revenge. In war’s immediate aftermath, the United States seemed once more to stand as a colossus, the world’s only indispensable nation, one so powerful that, as Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld mused, “could make its own reality.”

But the time of celebration quickly faded. The government’s claims that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was the prime instigator of the terrorist attacks broke down under serious examination. None of the 19 terrorists involved in the attacks were Iraqi citizens — most were from Saudi Arabia — and bin Laden hated Hussein’s government. American claims that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction” were shown to be lies manufactured by the American state, amplified by a compliant media, to justify geopolitical aims.

The American invasion of Afghanistan was only somewhat more justified, as the Taliban government had housed bin Laden. Still, the Taliban were not directly involved in the attacks. Afghanistan proved another costly venture.

The 9/11 attacks and the American government’s responses were part one in setting the stage for Donald Trump’s presidency. The second part came with the great recession of 2008-10. The recession shook America’s, and the world’s, capitalist economies. Unemployment and bankruptcies soared. A few major banks and investment companies folded, though financiers in general did very well.

Faith in the free market tumbled. The United States had been, since the 1980s, the chief patron of neo-liberal efforts to create a borderless world. The trauma of 9/11 was repeated now across the economic landscape.

The effect of these two events was to weaken American’s faith in their political institutions and in the people running them. For many Americans, the country seemed run by a dishonest and corrupt elite.

The loss of faith spread easily to both the Republican and Democratic parties, which had supported both the wars and globalization. The result was a crisis of legitimacy embracing the country’s political, economic, and cultural spheres.

The road was thus paved for an outsider, a tough-guy populist, who promised an end to foreign adventurism and economic globalization, while also playing to deeply entrenched racist tropes. Under previous administrations, the United States had been “ripped off” by other countries and been asked to carry too much of the burden. Trump said he would make White America great again.

Donald Trump needed the Republican machine — its capacity and the lingering affection of its supporters — in 2016 to get elected, but the party was already hobbled, a mere ghost. Today, Abraham Lincoln’s Republican party exists in name only. It is now the Donald Trump party.

What happens now for the United States is unclear. It is $40 trillion in debt and faces significant political and military challengers abroad. At home, it is riven by multiple internal fractures that the Trump administration has only exacerbated. The threat of increased authoritarianism, democratic failure, and violence grow. This crisis will not end with Trump’s departure.

9/11 did not solely cause the current crisis. It may have occurred anyway. But the attacks did speed up America’s decline. Only in his wildest dreams could Osama bin Laden have imagined the United States in 2026.

Trevor W. Harrison is a retired political sociologist at the University of Lethbridge. His latest book, Safarnameh: A Traveller’s Journey Along the Hippie Trail, was published by Athabasca University Press.