Amid the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against America, MS NOW’s Katy Tur marked the moment by attacking the ensuing War on Terror, which she said sowed “fear and division” along with “Islamophobia and hate.” Tur then connected the aftermath of the attacks, which she labeled as Islamophobic, to the rise of Donald Trump and the “Make America Great Again” movement.
At the beginning of her 3 PM hour, The Moment host remembered the events of 9/11 with a non-political description of the day's events. Tur began, “At 8:46 in the morning, everything changed. At first, though, most assumed a plane accidentally hit one of the twin towers. Terrorism was always in the realm of possibility, but surely not something like this. It was not until 17 minutes later, when a second plane crashed, this time into the other tower, the South Tower, that the world realized nothing would ever be the same."
Tur continued, “There was a big bang and a hard shake at the Pentagon. The whiz of a crashing plane near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Then the towers collapsing and a cloud of dirty yellow dust.”
MS NOW host Katy Tur marked the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by condemning the ensuing War on Terror that, she said, sowed “fear and division, Islamophobia and hate.” Tur then claimed the terrorist attacks led to the rise of ‘Make America Great Again’ and Trump.… pic.twitter.com/ePWdtfFXM3
— Nick (@nspin310) September 11, 2026
But, Tur then shifted to bash the aftermath of the events, especially the War on Terror:
Terrifying on the ground, terrifying on the screen. No one knew yet that what would follow would be decades of conflict, a war on terror that killed 7000 American soldiers and 250,000 Iraqi and Afghan civilians. Conflict that took that brief moment of unity following the attacks and shattered it, sowing fear and division, Islamophobia, and hate and anger toward the establishment for trapping us in a never-ending war, people said, based on lies.
She added, “One that robbed us of blood and treasure, around $8 trillion. Just as chasing the American dream here at home would cost us more and more and more and more.”
As one might expect from an MS NOW host, she then also connected the horrific terrorist attacks and the aftermath, which she described as being marked by “Islamophobia” and “hate,” to the rise of Trump and MAGA: “All told, it is not hard to draw a line from 9/11 to the rise of Make America Great Again.”
Tur continued to rail on Trump and mentioned the so-called muslim ban from his first term:
The movement is led by a president who claimed, falsely, that muslims were cheering the attacks from the streets of Jersey City. A president who has pretended he was always against the war. One who campaigned on that stolen wisdom and promised that with his Muslim ban, he would be the one to finally keep the terrorists out. “The establishment failed you because it was too weak and too corrupt to tell the truth, to do the hard thing,” he said.
Tur closed her mini-speech and said, “Donald Trump tapped into what had been building for 15 years: a feeling of betrayal, of fear, of anger toward Washington. The question for today in 2026, 25 years later, is where has it all left us?”
25 years after the horrific attacks on America that changed the country forever, Tur made the choice to dedicate much of her focus to Islamophobia and Trump, while that time could be spent on more stories of the victims of 9/11.
The transcript is below. Click "expand":
MS NOW’s The Moment with Katy Tur
September 11, 2026
3:01:37 PM Eastern
KATY TUR: Good to be with you, I'm Katy Tur.
By all accounts, it was a perfect morning. 69 degrees, not a cloud in the sky, sort of like this video shot in August, just weeks before. Pilots call those types of days severe clear. Michael Jackson had just wrapped up two nights at MSG. Millions were heading to work at Cantor Fitzgerald or Marsh & McLennan, an insurance firm, or to vote in New York City. It was the election.
Others were reporting for duty in midtown at Engine 54, Ladder 4, Battalion 9, or at the Pentagon. Some were headed on a field trip to California with their teachers. Congress was back in session. It was supposed to be any other September day, but it was not.
At 8:46 in the morning, everything changed. At first, though, most assumed a plane accidentally hit one of the twin towers. Terrorism was always in the realm of possibility, but surely not something like this. It was not until 17 minutes later, when a second plane crashed, this time into the other tower, the South Tower, that the world realized nothing would ever be the same.
25 years later, so many of us still remember Manhattan being shut down. Every single bridge and tunnel connecting the city to the rest of the world closed. Hospital workers waiting for the mass casualties that never came. Missing persons fliers all over Lower Manhattan. Abandoned cars whose owners never made it back.
There was a big bang and a hard shake at the Pentagon. The whiz of a crashing plane near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Then the towers collapsing and a cloud of dirty yellow dust.
Terrifying on the ground, terrifying on the screen. No one knew yet that what would follow would be decades of conflict, a war on terror that killed 7000 American soldiers and 250,000 Iraqi and Afghan civilians. Conflict that took that brief moment of unity following the attacks and shattered it, sowing fear and division, Islamophobia, and hate, and anger toward the establishment for trapping us in a never-ending war, people said, based on lies.
One that robbed us of blood and treasure, around $8 trillion. Just as chasing the American dream here at home would cost us more and more and more and more.
All told, it is not hard to draw a line from 9/11 to the rise of Make America Great Again. The movement is led by a president who claimed, falsely, that muslims were cheering the attacks from the streets of Jersey City. A president who has pretended he was always against the war. One who campaigned on that stolen wisdom and promised that with his Muslim ban, he would be the one to finally keep the terrorists out. “The establishment failed you because it was too weak and too corrupt to tell the truth, to do the hard thing,” he said.
Donald Trump tapped into what had been building for 15 years: a feeling of betrayal, of fear, of anger toward Washington. The question for today in 2026, 25 years later, is where has it all left us?
(...)
3:10:31 PM Eastern
TUR: We think back and we romanticize the unity of the moment. I'm certainly culpable of that, I think about how this country came together. But my experience of it is not what everyone's experience of it was. In the immediate aftermath, there was a real rise in islamophobia. What happened there?
GARRETT GRAFF: Yeah, there was a very immediate rise in anti-muslim sentiment in the United States. And one of the things that is hard for us to remember is how hard George W bush tried as president in those first couple of days and weeks and months of the war on terror, to ensure that the war on terror was not seen as a war against muslims. And he goes actually here in Washington a couple of days after 9/11 and gives this remarkable speech that Al Qaeda – He goes to a mosque and he says Al Qaeda is not representative of Islam. It is not representative of muslims. Islam is a religion of peace. It is a religion that gives peace and comfort and hope to 1.6 billion people around the world. And our problem, as America is not with muslims.
And it was a very un-obvious thing to say then, and it's all the more un-obvious now that we see how President Trump is able to stoke those feelings. It's a war of nuance that George W Bush ultimately loses across the 2000s. Of course, remember, Donald Trump comes to political prominence as the key cheerleader of the birther movement. The idea, the false idea that Barack Hussein Obama is a secret Muslim born in Kenya, sent to undermine American democracy, and that that Muslim ban is one of the first things that Donald Trump does.
He comes he runs for president in 2015, 2016, against the backdrop of the ISIS terror attacks of that moment. Calls for the complete and total shutdown of muslims entering the United States in the wake of that December 2015 San Bernardino shooting.
And, you know, now here we are 25 years later. And if you go into many communities across the country, many specific populations, they will tell you that they are more afraid of the agencies we created to stop the next 9/11. Dhs, ice, the border patrol, than they are of the threat of foreign terrorism on the streets of America today.
(...)
