The religion of national security

Anyone who’s camped out at a folk music festival and has been woken up at 2 a.m. by a blaringly rendered version of “Bella Ciao” knows that trumpet players are terrorists. But the Trump administration is taking that a bit literally: The Department of Commerce announced in early August that it plans to implement a 25 percent tariff on brass instruments, citing national security concerns about America’s perceived overreliance on foreign copper alloys. The move throws into sharp relief how far the term “national security” has wandered from its bare-bones literal meaning: defending a country from threats.

Our leaders have been referencing “national security” more or less since the founding. In a 1791 address to Congress, George Washington argued that militias were “of primary importance” to the young country’s “national security” to, among other things, fight against the “deluded tribes.” 

But the term didn’t enter everyday vernacular until much later. During the New Deal era, as historian Andrew Preston put it in his book Total Defense, its meaning expanded: “Security became ideological as well as territorial, normative as well as physical, global and not just continental. It became, as it still is today, all-encompassing.” 

Americans’ anti-communist fervor during the Cold War then laid the groundwork for today’s formalized national security state. The National Security Act of 1947 created many of the structures we now see as intrinsic to our national security, such as the CIA, the National Security Council, and the Department of Defense—even if it never actually defined the term. It “is sort of like a Christmas tree. Everybody can just kind of hang what they want onto it,” Delaware Law School professor Elizabeth Beavers told me. 

The September 11 attacks weighed down that tree with a host of new meanings. Yumna Rizvi, a fellow at the Center for International Policy, cites the fall of the twin towers as the point when national security swallowed the world. Within days, Congress passed a sweeping authorization of military force that has yet to be repealed, and President George W. Bush was calling for a “crusade” against “terrorism.” By January 2002, the US had opened its prison at Guantánamo Bay for combatants in the so-called global war on terror. Just over a year after 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security was officially up and running. 

“We became a fear-based, hyper-security state,” Rizvi said. “It was a shock to the American system.” 

National security went from being a governmental priority to a full-blown religion. Bits of twisted steel from the wreckage of the towers were shipped all over the world and welded into ad hoc memorials in places like a strip mall in Parma, Ohio, and a firehouse in Giddings, Texas, where they were honored as saintly relics—“franchising 9/11 memory,” as researchers Samuel and Max Holleran put it. 

Some “survivor steel” was even melted into the hull of the USS New York, a warship later deployed to the Persian Gulf. The subsequent 20 years of war cost an estimated 900,000 lives—including about 15,000 Americans—and at least $4 trillion.  

Much of the infrastructure from the war on terror is still with us today. Events like the annual Christianity & National Security conference continue to cloak it in religious fervor. Meanwhile, “national security” has become a catchall for anything the government wants to spend money on—including domestic initiatives with little or no benefit to the public. 

Every president since Bush has made use of the blunt weapon of national security to push their interests, but Donald Trump’s use has been unprecedentedly brazen. The White House ballroom is national security. Canceling offshore wind leases and dialing back limits on toxic chemical emissions are national security. Erasing transgender people from public life is national security, too. 

And then there’s everybody’s favorite rage object, the hyperscale data center. As people started pushing back against these energy-guzzling, chatbot-sustaining behemoths en masse, those who stand to profit from the data center boom turned to a familiar argument. “It is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance,” Trump, who has invested millions of dollars in companies that build data center infrastructure, wrote in a 2025 executive order. Celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary, whose 40,000-acre data center proposal in Utah was met with furious backlash, promptly labeled his opponents Chinese Communist Party plants and declared his project a national security necessity. “Who would want to stop us from having the compute capacity to develop AI? Which adversary would want that? There’s only one, it’s China,” he said on Fox News. And Trump has described the AI giant Anthropic alternately as either useful to national security or a national security threat, depending on the day. 

Republicans aren’t alone in hanging their priorities on this Christmas tree. Gun violence has been dubbed a national security issue, and a spate of recent think pieces have declared Trump himself a national security threat. Other ideas transcend party lines. For decades, the Pentagon viewed climate change through that lens—“If you can’t land troops in a foreign country because the beach you thought was going to be something you could land on is no longer there, then it’s a national security issue,” one retired general warned on NPR during the first Trump administration. (The Defense Department “does not do climate change crap,” Secretary Pete Hegseth now insists.)  

The outcome, of course, is that if national security is everything, then national security is nothing at all, apart from a tool to revive a zombie army of post-9/11 legal mechanisms against all sorts of domestic dissidents—the slew of anti-ICE protesters charged under Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 can attest to that. “The system has expanded to new uses, new targets, new opportunities to vilify, to punish, to create division. It started with the vilification of Muslims, and now you see it being used against immigrants and people on the left,” Rizvi says. 

If Trump gets his way, it might be used against your local middle school’s tuba player, too.