Up to now, the two most traumatic public events of this century for most Americans are the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center and the mob assault of Jan. 6, 2021, on the U.S. Capitol in the violent attempt to overturn the result of a presidential election. It took four years, but the Capitol attackers achieved their objective with the reelection of the president who put them up to it and, once in office, pardoned them and sprang them from prison. The drama now playing in and beyond Washington is a diabolical mashup of these events with the president cast as the hijacker-in-chief. His copilot-slash-navigator is the freelance hatchet man Elon Musk. Like the Sept. 11 hijackers, neither one of them knows how to land the plane.

“Apocalyptic nihilism” was the pithy phrase used by some commentators to describe the political philosophy of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida crew who sacrificed their lives to bring down the Twin Towers. With no strategic purpose except to kill as many people as possible, demolish an architectural landmark emblematic of the world economy and sow fear in the hearts of infidels, Mohammed Atta and his cohorts unleashed their righteous wrath and succeeded not only in producing a spectacle of televised mass murder but in disrupting air travel ever since — as we are reminded every time we must endure the ordeal of passing through airport security.

The ship of state in our lightning-paced electronic age is no longer a metaphorical battleship or ocean liner but a passenger jet, and we are the passengers. Captain Trump and his national insecurity team have assured us over the intercon (sic) that there’s nothing to worry about as they throw overboard much of the aircraft’s mechanical infrastructure. Such indiscriminate dismantlement of the very plane they are flying is, we are told, simply a matter of efficiency and when enough parts are discarded the plane will be light enough to fly itself.

But what is our destination? The World Trade Center no longer exists, but world trade does — or did — and since our pilot is bent on proving himself the most potent nihilist on the planet, his attempt to annihilate world trade with tariffs is an even more apocalyptic ambition than those Bush-league 9/11 clowns or J6 patriots could dream of achieving. The captain is trying to crash the economy he was hired to fly simply because he can, and what are we going to do about it?

It’s a vexing question because most of us, when we boarded this flight, didn’t expect so much turbulence so soon. Even Congress and the courts and the oligarchs and patriarchs up there in Business Class are locked out of the cockpit while the autocrats are on autopilot, gleefully counting their cryptocurrency and laughing all the way to the banker bunker on Mars where Musk has convinced Trump they’re going, once they dump the rest of us like so much space junk.

If you want to be heroic like the 9/11 travelers on United Flight 93 over Pennsylvania, you can try to storm the cockpit and keep the aircraft from crashing into the White House, but that is a suicide mission. If you get past the black-clad gun-toting tech-thugs guarding the patriarchs and oligarchs from the rest of us in Economy, there’s no place to go but down. There is no parachute or lifejacket under your seat — they were discarded with Social Security, Medicaid, science and education — so if you manage to open an emergency exit you’ll be sucked into nothingness.

The test flight of American democracy has lasted nearly 250 years, a pretty good run for any political experiment, and long past obsolescence for an airplane. I’m trying to see this historical moment as if from 30,000 feet and falling, which is roughly where we are, and witness with detachment the end of an empire.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.