America Hijacked: An Honest Indictment That Lets Trump Off the Hook

Who hijacked America?

[S.] M. Carlson’s answer is that no single party, president, or intelligence agency did it alone. The hijacking was carried out over decades by overlapping groups of officials, political families, military contractors, covert operators, propagandists, and wealthy fixers. They lied the country into wars, concealed one another’s crimes, protected useful criminals, and then invited Americans to argue about whether the Republicans or Democrats were to blame. Carlson’s America Hijacked is broadly right about that. It is also a useful introduction for readers who sense that the public history of the United States no longer accounts for the country in which they live.

This is an ambitious book. It begins with Vietnam and the Gulf of Tonkin, moves through Iran-Contra and the first Gulf War, devotes a long section to 9/11, and then examines the Bush and Clinton political machines. Carlson proceeds through the Obama years, the 2016 election, the first Trump presidency, Biden’s record, the Afghanistan withdrawal, and the war in Ukraine. That is a great deal of ground for 268 pages. The result is sometimes uneven, but the cumulative case is much stronger than any individual allegation.

The organizing insight is sound: American political corruption is continuous even when administrations change. Lyndon Johnson’s use of the doubtful Gulf of Tonkin story belongs in the same history as the invented incubator atrocity used to sell the Gulf War. Iran-Contra belongs there too, as do the pardons that prevented a full accounting. Carlson is especially good when he follows the machinery of deception rather than the personality of a particular president. He writes that officials made a “conscious decision to manipulate facts” in order to build support for Vietnam. That phrase could serve as the refrain of the entire book.

The chapter on Iran-Contra shows why “Deep State” need not be a mysterious expression. Here were officials conducting foreign policy outside the law, moving weapons through intermediaries, financing an undeclared war, and frustrating congressional restrictions. George H. W. Bush claimed to be out of the loop even though his diary indicated otherwise. His later pardons protected men who might have implicated him. Carlson distinguishes reasonably between what the record establishes and the possible bargain behind the pardons. He cannot prove that silence was exchanged for clemency, and says so. The documented facts are bad enough.

His discussion of the first Gulf War makes the same point from another direction. The tearful story about Iraqi soldiers removing Kuwaiti babies from incubators was presented as spontaneous eyewitness testimony. It turned out to be a public-relations production involving the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter and Hill & Knowlton. Carlson is right to linger over this. Modern wars are often sold through a simple atrocity story long before citizens can examine the evidence. By the time the correction arrives, the bombs have fallen and the contractors have submitted their invoices.

The book’s treatment of 9/11 is its longest and most contentious portion. Carlson reviews prior warnings, intelligence failures, the collapse of the towers, Building 7, the conduct of the Bush administration, and the uses to which the attacks were put. His conclusion is that the “official story is able to explain” less than its guardians pretend. He gives considerable space to advocates of controlled demolition and believes explosives were probably used.

I am not persuaded that every technical step in this argument has been established. Some of the sources are stronger than others, and Carlson occasionally moves too quickly from anomaly to probable explanation. Still, he does something that the respectable press has largely refused to do: he treats unresolved questions as questions. He also rejects claims for which he cannot find adequate evidence, including a familiar story about Marvin Bush and World Trade Center security. That willingness to discard an attractive allegation gives the better parts of his case more weight.

Carlson’s deeper point does not depend on proving every 9/11 theory. The attacks provided the opportunity for a faction already committed to Middle Eastern war. The United States invaded Iraq even though Saddam Hussein’s government had no operational responsibility for 9/11. The result was the expansion of executive power, mass surveillance, fortunes for contractors, and a ruinous occupation whose costs were paid by American families and Iraqi civilians. Whether one believes the attacks were allowed, assisted, or merely exploited, their political use is part of the public record.

The sections on the Bush and Clinton dynasties are meant to break the reader of partisan habits. Carlson presents the Bush family as closely tied to intelligence operations, covert war, and the financial interests surrounding the national-security state. He then turns to the Clintons, covering Whitewater, the Arkansas drug-running allegations, Vince Foster, Jeffrey Epstein, the Clinton Foundation, Uranium One, Benghazi, and the email scandal.

This section contains useful material, but it also displays the book’s chief weakness. Carlson is strongest when he has official records, contemporary reporting, or sworn testimony under his hand. He is less convincing when he relies on chains of allegation concerning Mossad, Vince Foster, and the darker reaches of the Clinton world. The distinction between fact, reasonable inference, and speculation is not always maintained as firmly as it should be. A hostile reviewer could use the weakest claims to evade the strongest ones. That would be dishonest, but authors dealing with protected power must expect dishonesty and deny it easy ammunition.

The Epstein chapter belongs near the center of the book’s argument. Epstein received extraordinary indulgence from federal prosecutors, moved among presidents and billionaires, and died in federal custody while the safeguards meant to keep him alive conveniently failed. Carlson recognizes that this was more than a lurid sex scandal. It was evidence of a class of people operating under a different law. His treatment is incomplete because the public record remains incomplete, but he asks the proper question: what power could obtain such protection?

Carlson is also right to reject Barack Obama’s cultivated image as a reformer. Obama inherited the surveillance state and strengthened it. He expanded destructive foreign interventions, oversaw the ruin of Libya, and prosecuted leakers while rewarding the institutions responsible for the financial crisis. His administration’s conduct toward the Trump campaign deserves investigation regardless of one’s opinion of Trump. A state that spies on a political campaign, launders partisan material through official channels, and conceals its methods behind classification is dangerous even when its target is a bad man.

The book’s final third brings the story through Biden, Afghanistan, energy policy, and Ukraine. Carlson sees the withdrawal from Afghanistan chiefly as a humiliating display of American weakness. I would put the matter differently. Leaving Afghanistan was necessary; remaining there for another twenty years would not have redeemed the first twenty. The disgrace lay in the war itself and in an imperial establishment that could neither win nor withdraw competently.

His discussion of Ukraine is more balanced. He condemns the Russian invasion but acknowledges that NATO expansion and the prospect of Ukrainian membership touched vital Russian security interests. He also sees that sanctions increased energy prices without producing the promised Russian collapse. By the end of the chapter, he observes that the conflict continued “without a foreseeable conclusion.” That judgment has aged better than the confident assurances issued by Washington’s television generals.

Carlson’s worst error is his excessive generosity toward Donald Trump. He presents Trump’s first election as a rupture in establishment rule and calls his style a “much-needed insult” to Washington’s corridors of power. That interpretation was understandable when Trump’s enemies were intelligence officials, corporate journalists, Bush Republicans, and Democratic operatives. The effort to destroy his presidency was real. So was the public revolt that elected him.

Yet opposition from one faction of the ruling class did not make Trump independent of the others. He staffed his first administration with bankers, generals, and neoconservative retreads. He protected the Epstein system by failing to expose it when he possessed the authority to do so. In his second term he finally revealed himself as the worst of the bought-and-paid-for lackeys of the ruling class. The man who promised to end the forever wars joined Israel in launching the Iran war and has kept Americans in it for more than six months. His administration later requested nearly $88 billion in additional funding, most of it connected to that conflict. The populist tribune ended as another debt-financed imperial president, only louder. Associated Press, Axios

None of this vindicates the people who conspired against him. It vindicates Carlson’s larger thesis. The system can persecute a man and still absorb him. It can try to remove him while another group of donors and foreign-policy interests purchases his loyalty. Trump was never outside the ruling class. He was a quarrel within it, packaged as a rebellion and sold to Americans who had every reason to want a rebellion.

America Hijacked is not the final word on any of these subjects. Its documentation needs tightening, its technical claims need more disciplined separation, and its account of Trump now requires a severe correction. But the book performs a valuable service. It teaches readers to look for continuity beneath party theater and to follow the interests protected by secrecy.

Carlson has assembled a prosecutorial brief against the official history of modern America. Some counts are proven beyond much doubt. Others remain plausible but unproven. A few should have been left out until better evidence emerged. The central charge nevertheless stands: a governing class has repeatedly deceived the American people, waged wars for purposes it would not state honestly, and placed its members beyond the law.

That is not a comforting conclusion. It is, however, a necessary one. You cannot recover your property while continuing to admire the thieves, and you cannot recover a republic while waiting for one of its purchased politicians to save it. Carlson has described much of the hijacking. The next step is to stop mistaking a change of driver for the return of the vehicle.