Mamdani And Trump Underscore A Shift In 9/11 Discourse 25 Years Later

NEW YORK — Each year on the anniversary of Sept. 11, politicians of various stripes join victims’ families for a commemoration ceremony in downtown Manhattan, putting aside partisan beef and pledging to “never forget.”

This year is different.

President Donald Trump is skipping Friday’s 25th anniversary ceremony at ground zero, reportedly because he wasn’t given an opportunity to deliver remarks. Vice President JD Vance plans to attend instead — and stoked outrage last week by suggesting he’d use the occasion to ridicule former President Joe Biden, who’ll also attend despite his battle with cancer.

Meanwhile, Republicans and the relatives of some victims have demanded Mayor Zohran Mamdani stay away, with GOP gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman encouraging 9/11 families to turn their backs on him during the ceremony.

Those rebukes stem in part from Mamdani’s connections to figures like Hasan Piker, a political commentator who said “America deserved 9/11,” and others who’ve minimized the attacks or blamed U.S. foreign policy. Some of the backlash against the city’s first Muslim mayor has been tagged as Islamophobic.

The result is that Friday's ceremony — the most significant since the 10th anniversary — is shaping up less as a truce than as a partisan stage. And all that rancor is playing out against a backdrop in which an increasing share of voters were born after the terror attacks, nudging the inevitable shift of a visceral tragedy into something more abstract — and raising the question of whether Sept. 11 survives as one of the last rituals both parties still observe together.

“A lot of people in this country and in this city have lost sight and lost focus of what is important. The day of 9/11 is a day to remember those we lost to senseless violence, and it’s a day when we put away our ideologies and unite as one,” said John Feal, an Army veteran and advocate for 9/11 survivors who did recovery work at ground zero. “The day is sacred, and it’s really disappointing, almost disturbing, that we can so easily be distracted by politics.”

For years, polling has shown fewer and fewer young Americans consider 9/11 an event that had a serious impact on their lives.

The shift in sentiment has picked up since 2020, when people born after the attacks became the country’s youngest eligible voters, a constituency whose views on 9/11 are often colored by skepticism about U.S. interventionism.

Mamdani was a 9-year-old Manhattan elementary school student when the towers were struck.

Before being elected mayor, he spoke publicly about the lasting imprint of his aunt choosing to stop wearing her hijab on the subway, fearful of the anti-Muslim bigotry that became more prevalent after the attacks. He’s also long spoken critically about how the NYPD surveilled Muslims after 9/11.

In talking about the terror attack itself, Mamdani for years posted an almost identical social media message on each anniversary. “Nearly 3,000 New Yorkers died on 9/11,” it begins, and then goes on to mourn “our neighbors who died that day” as well as the “hundreds of thousands who died in the wars that followed.” The posts, which have resurfaced on social media recently, have drawn backlash from critics who contend he should have more directly characterized those deaths in New York City as murders.

Since becoming mayor, Mamdani has moderated his language to sound more like his predecessors.

He now speaks almost exclusively about first responders’ bravery on Sept. 11 and the heartbreak of families whose loved ones died in the twin towers. He’s visited numerous firehouses and police precincts to talk about the sacrifices made by the NYPD and FDNY on 9/11, created an online portal for the public to access records related to the recovery and has packed his schedule in the week leading up to the 25th anniversary with events memorializing the tragedy.

For his detractors, that hasn’t been nearly enough.

On Tuesday, a small group of GOP lawmakers and victims’ families gathered outside City Hall to demand Mamdani refrain from attending Friday’s ceremony at ground zero. Former Gov. George Pataki and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who were both in office on 9/11, have similarly called on him to stay away. They’ve pointed to Mamdani’s association with Piker (who has apologized for his infamous 9/11 comment, which was condemned by Mamdani).

Giuliani, however, also invoked the mayor’s religion in a rant that compared him to the perpetrators of 9/11 — part of a broader strain of anti-Muslim sentiment pushed to the extreme by GOP Council Member Vickie Paladino.

New York Democratic leaders have condemned those calls. And a recent poll of registered voters found that 74 percent of New York City residents surveyed said Mamdani should be at the ceremony.

“Division should not prevail over the spirit of unity that brought us together after September 11th. On this 25th anniversary, we should honor those we lost by coming together again as New Yorkers and Americans,” Gov. Kathy Hochul wrote in a social media post. “The Mayor of New York City will be there, as he should be.”

Trump, who plans to give remarks at a Pentagon ceremony instead of attending the one in his native city, has his own controversial history with the 9/11 attack. At the time a private real estate developer, in the immediate aftermath of the towers’ collapse, Trump said in an interview with a local news station that a building he owned, 40 Wall St., was once again the tallest building in Lower Manhattan. (It was not.)

He’s offered confusing accounts of his whereabouts that day, repeating an unconfirmed story as recently as Tuesday that he was whisked out of a downtown office building by two firefighters who thought it might collapse. And Trump has also resurfaced unverified claims he took construction workers to ground zero to help with recovery efforts, though others who were on site have no recollection of his presence.

In the aftermath of the attacks, Trump claimed to have seen “thousands and thousands of people” he claimed were Muslims dancing and celebrating on New Jersey rooftops as the towers fell, a claim that has since been widely refuted.

Notably, Republicans like Giuliani and Pataki haven’t criticized Trump for his inflammatory 9/11 comments over the years or spoken on whether it’s appropriate for a sitting president to forego this week’s ceremony at ground zero.

“Obviously I would like to have had President Trump to be here, but he can’t be in two places at once,” Pataki told POLITICO on Wednesday. “He is going to the Pentagon and he is speaking there. It’s not as though he’s ignoring the date. He’s appropriately recognizing it at the Pentagon.”

While Pataki has called on Mamdani to skip the memorial, the former governor also acknowledged that the anniversary will inevitably draw elected officials.

“Human nature is human nature. I don’t think we can ban certain people who hold political office from attending,” he said. “We just have to hope that the example we set — respect and dignity during the course of the reading of the names and the recognition of the attacks on the towers and when they collapsed is what matters.”

Earlier this week, Mamdani took a thinly veiled shot at Giuliani when he accused city government officials of lying about the air quality in Lower Manhattan after the attack.

“People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” Mamdani said. “And then, when they began to contend with the symptoms of the illnesses that followed, the government that had not hesitated to send them into harm's way was nowhere to be found.”

When POLITICO asked if he thinks Giuliani should stay away from Friday’s ceremony because of that, Mamdani replied that the focus “should be on the New Yorkers who were killed that day, their families, the survivors, the first responders. I don’t think it should be on politicians.”

On Wednesday, Giuliani spokesperson Ted Goodman responded to Mamdani’s accusations, saying the former mayor’s administration was relying on air quality assessments from the federal government.

“Now would be a good time to remind Mayor Mamdani that cowardly terrorists acting in the name of Islam are 100 percent responsible for all of the death and destruction on September 11, 2001, and for all of the suffering and illness that have continued since that day,” Goodman said. “It is a shame that Mayor Mamdani is now attempting to score cheap partisan political points by seeming to blame the local officials who rushed to the scene.”

Marc Shaw, who served as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s chief operating officer on 9/11 and later played a key role in leading the city’s recovery as a deputy to former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, said he believes the calls for Mamdani to stay away are pure politics.

“It’s just another thing on that list of people who don’t like the current mayor and how they hate him for various reasons. It actually has nothing to do with 9/11,” Shaw said in an interview.

“I am concerned about it,” he added, “but in the larger universe of what it means for politics in the city and the country and our democracy.”

Trump is the only living current or former president who won’t be at Friday’s memorial ceremony in Manhattan, which will be attended by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Biden.

The acerbic discourse ahead of this year’s commemoration — and the idea that a sitting president would skip the Lower Manhattan ceremony on the 25th anniversary — is a far cry from what many public servants and New Yorkers remember as a profound solidarity in the months after the attack.

Joe Lhota, a deputy mayor under Giuliani whose experience of surviving the towers’ collapse preceded weeks of daily press conferences focused on the city’s recovery, recalled “an extreme sense of unification in the country.”

“People came together for all kinds of good reasons,” he said. “And somewhere along the way, it fell apart. We have gone to our corners.”

(Lhota argued Mamdani should be able to go to the ceremony without controversy, and said he received no information about poor air quality during the several months he served in city government following the attacks.)

In some ways, the drain of solemn bonhomie from 9/11 has been hiding in the demographics for a generation.

A recent Emerson poll found that while older Americans were more likely to recall the time after 9/11 as defined by unity and patriotism, members of Gen X and millennials — who are now reaching middle age — reported those feelings in smaller numbers.

And adults now aged 18 to 24 — representing the youngest cohort of voters — do not have any recollection at all. They were born after the attack and have primarily learned about it in school.

Julie Menin, speaker of the New York City Council, owned a restaurant near the twin towers that was devastated in the attacks. She spent much of the ensuing decade working for a nonprofit she founded, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and as the chair of the local community board on rebuilding efforts. Her mother, who lived in the Financial District, died in 2015 from what Menin believes was a 9/11-related illness.

In her current role, Menin recently allocated $1 million to bring New York City middle school students to the 9/11 memorial and museum, where she was a founding trustee.

The idea is to not only keep alive a more visceral awareness of the wanton destruction and threat to American democracy the attacks represented, but to illustrate the possibility of that political unity recalled by Lhota and others.

“When people go to the memorial, they can see that,” she said. “There is an exhibit on how, out of the ashes, came incredible acts of kindness and incredible organizations that started to help those who suffered on 9/11 … It’s my fervent hope that people can try to get back to that unity.”