# How national security came to mean everything

> A 25 percent tariff on trumpets shows how one phrase became the government's all-purpose excuse.
- Title: How national security came to mean everything · Mother Jones
- Summary: A 25 percent tariff on trumpets shows how one phrase became the government's all-purpose excuse. When a term can justify a ballroom, a data center, and a…
- Keywords: national security, politics, 9/11, war on terror, surveillance, national, security, came, mean, everything, Mother Jones
- Source: Mother Jones — https://motherjones.com/politics/2026/09/national-security-9-11-trump
- Author: Sophie Hurwitz
- Published: 2026-09-11T08:00:00+00:00
- Read time: 1 min
- Topics: national security, politics, 9/11, war on terror, surveillance
## Tariffs on trumpets
Commerce announced a 25 percent tariff on brass instruments in early August, citing reliance on foreign copper alloys as a national security risk.
## A phrase that wandered off
Defending a country from threats was the original meaning. Brass instruments are a long way from that.
## Washington said it first
In a 1791 address to Congress, George Washington called militias "of primary importance" to national security, partly to fight the "deluded tribes."
## The New Deal stretched it
Historian Andrew Preston tracks the shift: security stopped being about territory and became ideological, normative, and global.

> It became, as it still is today, all-encompassing.
## 1947 built the machine
The National Security Act created the CIA, the National Security Council, and the Department of Defense, without ever defining the term itself.

> It is sort of like a Christmas tree. Everybody can just kind of hang what they want onto it.
## After the towers fell
Within days Congress passed a military authorization still on the books. Guantanamo opened by January 2002, Homeland Security a year after that.

> We became a fear-based, hyper-security state.
## Steel as saintly relic
Twisted beams from the wreckage went to a strip mall in Parma, Ohio and a Texas firehouse. Some was melted into a warship sent to the Persian Gulf.
## The bill for 20 years
The wars that followed cost an estimated 900,000 lives, about 15,000 of them American, and at least $4 trillion.
## Trump hangs everything on it
The White House ballroom. Canceled offshore wind leases. Looser toxic emission limits. Erasing transgender people from public life. All filed as national security.
## If it means everything
Then it means nothing, except a way to aim post-9/11 legal machinery at new targets. It started with Muslims, and now reaches immigrants and anti-ICE protesters.

> The system has expanded to new uses, new targets, new opportunities to vilify, to punish, to create division.
## Key takeaway

When a term can justify a ballroom, a data center, and a tariff on tubas, it has stopped describing a threat and started describing a power.