This is the Sept. 10, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
“Progress requires both urgency and perseverance.”
— Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in The Atlantic
The United States marks 25 years since the Sept. 11 attacks tomorrow, with thousands of survivors and first responders still living with illnesses tied to toxic exposure at ground zero. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (then a senator from New York) joined “Morning Joe” today to discuss what she learned in the aftermath of 9/11 — and how those lessons apply to artificial intelligence, the war with Iran, and American democracy.
MB: You write in a new piece for The Atlantic about a different part of the 9/11 story that is still coming into focus. What are we only now beginning to understand?
HC: Our own government lied to people about the air quality in the area. We circled ground zero, which was still, to me, the most emotionally vivid, horrific view of anything I’ve ever seen, like Dante’s hell.
And as we got closer, it was like a literal black stage curtain had been put across the entire area, and occasionally you would see a foot and a hand and an ax as a firefighter would come through it.
Everything that was in the air was so visible. It wasn’t just what we were feeling in the back of our throats and our noses, but it was surrounding us.
It struck me that it couldn’t be safe to breathe, but I kept being told by official sources that it was fine.
Part of what I learned is that the job of a public official in a crisis is to keep digging for as much information as possible. There were all these competing challenges — everybody wanted to get Wall Street open and “go back to normal.”
But you ought to be able to do more than one thing at a time. I was fortunate enough to put together a Senate hearing. It was the first time we began to get real data, and now all these documents are coming out from the city. Tell people the truth, to the best of your ability.
JS: The 9/11 Commission identified a “failure of imagination.” Are we seeing that now with artificial intelligence?
HC: People could not imagine that a bunch of guys would learn how to fly and then fly commercial airliners into buildings. That was a failure of imagination and a failure of honesty.
We faced it during COVID, and now we are facing it with artificial intelligence.
The alarm bells are going off. You have people inside the industry — at OpenAI, Anthropic, and elsewhere — warning about what could happen. Why are we letting ourselves be lulled into inaction?
What I’m hearing from tech leaders is “Stop us before something really bad happens. I can’t stop myself because I’m not sure he’s going to stop, and I’m not sure China is going to stop.”
In two weeks, there should be a concerted effort by this government to get off social media, quit worrying about ballrooms and ridiculous arches, and come up with a plan to enlist the Chinese. Let’s put an AI commission on warp speed and figure out how to sensibly regulate.
JS: What did we get right and wrong in the wars that came out of 9/11 — Iraq and Afghanistan? What would you do differently?
HC: Afghanistan was a decision that I think had to be made to try to track down not only Osama bin Laden, but also other Al Qaeda operatives. But Afghanistan morphed into something much bigger. It represented an effort first by the Bush administration, then by the Obama administration, to see how we could create a more stable nation.
Iraq was different. I thought the vote would be used as coercive diplomacy to force Saddam Hussein to come clean about whatever was there.
But you have to ask yourself: Where are we today? We are the ones strengthening Iran. Have we not learned anything from what we’ve done for the last 25 years?
Willie Geist: Seven months into the war with Iran, what’s the best path forward for the United States?
HC: We’re in a pickle. It seems so tragic because Iran was on the back foot, and there were a lot of pressures that could have been applied to Iran through sanctions and other activities that Trump totally bypassed to make an incredibly ill-advised attack on Iran.
Our best outcome right now is to get allies in Europe and China to help us pressure Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz. Then give space for Trump to say “I got the strait open.” Once traffic is moving, oil prices will come down, and we can step back and see how this develops.
That’s the only thing I can see that could give us anything resembling an out right now.
Jonathan Lemire: How concerned are you that the midterm elections won’t be conducted freely — or that the results won’t be honored?
HC: I take seriously the attitude that Trump and his party have — that they couldn’t win a fair election in these midterms, so they’re going to try to prevent mail-in ballots from being sent and intimidate voters from going to the polls. States, election officials, attorneys general, advocates, and organizers are trying to be as ready as possible to counter whatever they decide to do.
But I am very confident we’re going to take back the House, and I’m increasingly confident we’re going to take the Senate. I think Americans want to put some big checks and balances on Trump for his last two years, given everything he has done — getting us into war, the business deals his family is making with dictators, and not resolving conflicts, leaving them to fester to continue to benefit themselves.
These are real events in people’s lives. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.
The vast majority of Americans, particularly independent swing voters, are done, and they want to check the power that the person in our Oval Office is wielding to an extent never before seen in American history.
JS: You were able to get hardened enemies to the table in Northern Ireland. Why has that been so difficult in the Middle East?
HC: You’re not going to make peace with your friends. You’ve got to make peace with the guys who have guns, and you’ve got to get everybody at the table.
We got to the brink of a Palestinian state, and we couldn’t get across the line. When Bill [Clinton] convinced Ehud Barak to make that offer for a Palestinian state to Yasser Arafat, he had every assurance from Arafat that he was eventually going to take the deal. But Arafat walked away — for fear of internal opposition, for fear that he’d be killed. When I became Secretary of State, we negotiated a 10-month settlement freeze — and I couldn’t get the Palestinians in until the ninth month because they could not figure out how to take advantage of this opportunity.
This requires constant attention, as well as the United States exercising tough love — not rejection and not total agreement. I love America, and I hate Trump’s government and policies. I love Israel, and I hate Netanyahu’s government and his policies.
I think we could work with a new government. There should be no impunity for the violence we see in the West Bank. It is not just about the death and destruction of the Palestinians and their property — any time you permit that level of violence, it creeps into the whole society.
It’s unfair, bad, and wrong for the Palestinians, and it’s also very dangerous to Israel. If the Israelis want to vote for that again, the United States has to take a very tough position.
WG: When the next president takes office, how does the country begin to put the pieces back together?
HC: I have had conversations with many of the people who potentially might run for president. I don’t know who will emerge.
But whoever that person is has to take the country on that journey. First and foremost, we’ve got to unite our country. We all have to be Americans again. It’s more important to put country over party. If we don’t separate the hate from the hope, I worry about my grandchildren, just like you worry about your kids.
We have to fix a lot of what’s been broken, and it’s not going to happen overnight.
Congress has to start legislating, helping people, and doing the hard work — not just arguing and yelling and finger-pointing. We want to get back to taking care of each other again.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.
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