Littwin Blames Trump for Replacing Post-9/11 Unity With Political Cruelty

"Everything has changed. And nothing has changed."

That is the opening line of a column published Tuesday by Mike Littwin in the Colorado Sun, and it hits harder than it should. Twenty-five years after two planes struck the World Trade Center, Littwin argues that we can draw a straight line from the unity of September 2001 to the current political fracture, specifically crediting Donald Trump for replacing national trust with "vanity and cruelty."

It is a bold historical claim. Littwin, who took the first flight out of Denver two days after the attacks, remembers the specific weight of that moment. He recalls a plane with only 12 people on board, just two of whom were civilians. The rest were airline employees or air marshals. He called his wife to tell her it would be the safest flight she’d ever take him on. She was skeptical. So was everyone else.

Littwin’s argument rests on a specific causal chain: the post-9/11 security state and Middle East wars created the conditions for today’s political reality. He points to the Abu Ghraib torture center as a precursor to what he calls ICE’s "jackbooted thugs" who now send immigrants to overseas detention facilities. He contrasts George W. Bush’s early speech framing Islam as a religion of peace with Trump’s 2015 campaign claim that he watched Jersey City Muslims cheering as the towers fell.

On paper, this is a neat narrative arc. In practice, it compresses 25 years of complex geopolitical shifts into a single political villain.

Let’s do the math on that timeline. The "forever wars" Littwin references in the Middle East were largely winding down or shifting focus well before Trump’s 2015 campaign launch. The security state he critiques was built by the Bush and Obama administrations, not Trump’s. Yet Littwin argues that the unity of those early days "would... lead directly to our disunity today." That is a leap. It assumes that the emotional capital generated by a shared trauma was solely harvested by one political figure, ignoring the economic shifts, technological changes, and policy decisions of two other presidential terms that happened in between.

Littwin’s personal account adds texture to the piece. He describes waiting hours in Dallas for a flight crew willing to take them to Philadelphia, then landing after 3 a.m. and taking the first train to New York. He watched Bush’s bullhorn speech on a small TV in a neighborhood bodega on West Broadway, just four blocks from Ground Zero. A police officer let him through a cordon after he shared his story.

Those details ground the column in sensory reality. The shock was real. The unity was real. But the jump from that bodega scene to a critique of current immigration enforcement is where the argument gets slippery. Littwin suggests that the "trust and faith" lost in 2001 was replaced by Trump’s worldview. He does not specify what metrics define that loss of faith, nor does he quantify the shift in public opinion between 2001 and today.

For locals, this is not just abstract political theory. The "security state" Littwin describes has tangible local impacts. When he mentions ICE’s "jackbooted thugs," he is referring to a federal enforcement presence that affects families in Denver, Colorado Springs, and across the Front Range. The connection he draws between Abu Ghraib and current detention centers is a rhetorical bridge, not a policy analysis. It tells us how he feels about the current administration’s approach to immigration, but it does not tell us whether that approach is a direct continuation of the post-9/11 security apparatus or a new iteration of it.

Littwin’s column is an opinion piece, and its strength lies in its emotional resonance rather than its empirical rigor. He captures the dissonance of looking back on a moment of national cohesion and seeing what it has become. That is a valid journalistic observation. But to claim that the "loss of faith" in Trump’s world is a direct result of 9/11 unity requires more than a straight line. It requires acknowledging the many curves, detours, and breaks in that 25-year path.

The practical bottom line for readers is this: Littwin’s column serves as a reminder that political narratives are often built on emotional memory rather than structural analysis. When he says "what we lost was trust and faith," he is speaking to a cultural mood, not a policy outcome. For neighbors dealing with the immediate realities of housing costs, infrastructure projects, and local governance, that mood is a backdrop, not the entire story. The 9/11 unity was a moment. Today’s disunity is a system. Conflating the two makes it harder to diagnose what is actually broken and how to fix it.