Seventeen years ago, around this time of morning, on a Tuesday like this one, members of the New York City Fire Department raced up the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center as those that were able raced down, escaping the fire and the smoke and the creaking walls of the once-mighty structures. Some who could not reach the stairs descended in other ways. Soon, the buildings fell in an almighty heap of rubble and glass, bending the trajectory of the world's predominant nation and shattering its illusions about the end of history.

In the years since, the date has taken on a sacred quality in America. It requires a display of gravitas and empathetic leadership from the President of the United States, as he is called upon to commemorate what happened in New York and at the Pentagon and in a field in Pennsylvania. Here is how the current president started this day.

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“We have found nothing to show collusion between President Trump & Russia, absolutely zero, but every day we get more documentation showing collusion between the FBI & DOJ, the Hillary campaign, foreign spies & Russians, incredible.” @SaraCarterDC @LouDobbs — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 11, 2018

No Collusion. That was the first thing the leader of the country thought of when he awoke. He followed it up with this: some hashtags over his social media guy's photo of...Donald Trump in the Oval Office.

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Trump is headed to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, this morning for a ceremony remembering those who died on Flight 93, which he announced with another photo of himself. This is how he arrived:

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.@realDonaldTrump First Lady Melania Trump greet supporters as they arrive in Johnstown, PA to attend the Flight 93 September 11 Memorial Service in Shanksville, PA pic.twitter.com/SRMBvlDLKJ — Doug Mills (@dougmillsnyt) September 11, 2018

You'll notice the First Lady had the grace not to look like she was walking into a Poison concert. But perhaps nothing better captures the president's attitude than a short and sweet tweet from about an hour ago:

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17 years since September 11th! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 11, 2018

The exclamation point is just quintessential. It has the ring of his tweets about the massive storms that slammed into American territory last hurricane season, in which he would marvel at what a Big Event each storm was set to be. Great ratings! The president seems constitutionally incapable of digesting the moral gravity of these events, perhaps because he struggles to empathize with other human beings—particularly those he does not know personally. The great aggregate of suffering fails to register.

That's how you get this reaction soon after the towers fell all those years ago:

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Yes, there's audio of Trump patting himself on the back for having the tallest building in Manhattan after the WTC fell on September 11th. pic.twitter.com/vQFFcAibQz — Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) September 11, 2018

All he can think about is What Does This Mean For Me? He doesn't even pause for a moment to remark on the monumental human catastrophe unfolding before him, as thousands of his fellow New Yorkers are lost, their many thousands of relatives permanently bereft, as a shroud of death engulfs his hometown. None of that matters in the slightest. Now he has the tallest building around. Longtime Trump chronicler Tim O'Brien has gone so far as to suggest the president subscribes to a "radical solipsism." Perhaps that's not mutually exclusive from old-fashioned malignant narcissism.

The most pressing question, of course, is how a man who remarked on the nation's greatest modern tragedy in this way is the elected leader of that nation 17 years later. There are a great many factors in play, but it's difficult to dispute anymore that while it brought out the best in some people, 9/11 also unleashed a kind of extended manic episode in American public life. It led to endless war, CIA black sites, torture, indefinite detention without trial, extrajudicial executions using unmanned vehicles in the sky (including of American citizens), warrantless surveillance of American citizens, and a new scourge of increasingly virulent Islamophobia.

Of course, no one has profited more off stoking fear about Muslims than Donald Trump.

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This is a disgusting lie, one of many that grew and metastasized in the anxiety-ridden era that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11. When the history books strive to make sense of this epoch, perhaps the attacks and the Trump presidency will serve as bookends. Perhaps he will be seen in the larger arc of growing conservative extremism, one which predates the attacks by decades. Perhaps there is more to come.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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