The city that bore the deepest wound of September 11, 2001, paused on Friday to mark twenty-five years since the attacks that redrew the skyline of Lower Manhattan and the course of American history.
Even amid the solemn ritual of reading nearly 3,000 names aloud, the day was shadowed by two political storms: President Donald Trump’s decision to commemorate the anniversary in Washington rather than New York and a bitter right-wing backlash against the presence of the city’s first Muslim mayor.
For a quarter of a century, sitting presidents have made it something close to a ritual obligation to stand at Ground Zero on the anniversary.
This year, Trump broke with that unwritten tradition, choosing instead to lay a wreath and observe a moment of silence at the Pentagon, the second site struck by hijackers that morning in 2001 and the place where 184 people lost their lives when American Airlines Flight 77 tore into the building’s western face.
His absence from Manhattan left Vice President JD Vance to represent the administration at Ground Zero, standing alongside a rare gathering of four former presidents: Republican George W. Bush, who occupied the Oval Office when the towers fell, and Democrats Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden.
It was a tableau of continuity across party lines—men who had each, in turn, carried the weight of a nation reshaped by that single morning, assembling in a city Trump himself once called home.
True to the format established in the memorial’s earliest years, the ceremony that began just after 8:40 a.m. was stripped of political oratory altogether.
There were no remarks from dignitaries, no campaign-season posturing, only the steady, unbroken cadence of relatives reading the names of the dead, punctuated by the tolling of a bell at each pivotal moment of the attack: the strikes on the towers, their collapse, the moment the Pentagon was hit, and the crash near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
It is a format designed, deliberately, to resist politicization. That it largely succeeded in tone on the ground did not stop the controversies swirling around its edges.
Among the visitors taking in the scene was Robert Kafka, a Chicagoan in his sixties, who reflected on why such rituals still matter a generation on. Remembrances like this one, he said, help keep the memory alive and serve as a safeguard, a way of understanding how the country might prevent a tragedy of that scale from happening again.
Standing among the assembled dignitaries was Mayor Zohran Mamdani, New York’s first Muslim chief executive, whose mere presence at the memorial had become the subject of a fevered campaign to keep him away.
The push was led by the New York Post and amplified by former mayor and Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, culminating in an online petition now bearing more than 100,000 signatures that accused Mamdani, without specifics, of associating with figures allegedly dismissive of American institutions or soft on extremism.
City council member Shahana Hanif pushed back forcefully against the campaign in an interview with CNN, saying it troubled her that the mayor appeared to be singled out for scrutiny simply because of his faith.
The controversy arrived even as Mamdani had, in the weeks prior, drawn praise across the political spectrum for an act of transparency: releasing thousands of pages of documents detailing what city officials had known and when about the toxic air that blanketed Lower Manhattan in the attacks’ aftermath.
That contamination, born of the initial dust cloud and the months of airborne debris that followed the towers’ collapse, has left thousands of New Yorkers battling cancers and respiratory illness in the decades since, a slow-motion casualty count that continues to grow even now.
The numbers from that morning remain almost impossible to absorb in full: nineteen Al-Qaeda hijackers commandeered four commercial airliners on a crisp, nearly cloudless Tuesday.
Two struck the Twin Towers, bringing down the 110-story landmarks in a collapse that killed thousands in under two hours. A third slammed into the Pentagon.
A fourth, believed to be bound for the Capitol or the White House, went down in a Pennsylvania field after passengers stormed the cockpit, an act of resistance now etched into the nation’s memory as its own form of heroism.
Yet the 2,977 who died that day represent only part of the reckoning. Federal health officials tracking illness linked to Ground Zero exposure now count more than 9,400 additional deaths in the years since, victims of cancers and lung disease tied to the toxic dust that hung over the city for months.
Twenty-five years on, roughly 100 million Americans alive today were either not yet born or too young to hold any memory of the attacks, a demographic reality that has begun to reshape how the anniversary is observed and understood.
Logan Miller, 32, knows that gap intimately. He lost an uncle in the towers and, years later, a grandfather to a 9/11-related illness.
Rather than despair at the fading of direct memory, he said he has noticed something else: a younger generation, unable to fully grasp what happened or how it altered lives like his, responding not with indifference but with curiosity, asking more questions, not fewer.
Huge crowds converged on Lower Manhattan for the service, met by a security posture befitting the scale of the gathering and the dignitaries in attendance.
The Secret Service established a protective perimeter around the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, while NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch confirmed that an anti-drone unit had been deployed as a precaution. She was careful to note, however, that no specific threat had been identified; the measure was preparation, not response to any known danger.
Even Al-Qaeda marked the day in its own fashion, releasing a video invoking the memory of Osama bin Laden and his son Hamza, whose death Trump announced back in 2019 had already closed that chapter of the terror network’s leadership.
Before the ceremony began, the city offered its own act of remembrance rendered in light rather than words: a drone display of 2,977 individual points rising over New York Harbor, one for every life lost, a quiet, wordless echo of the names about to be read on the ground below.
Twenty-five years removed from the attacks, New York’s commemoration remains, at its core, an act of collective memory.
But as Friday’s ceremony made clear, even the most solemn rituals are not immune to the currents of the moment—currents that, this year, ran through questions of who chooses to show up, who is asked to stay away, and what it means to remember together in a country still finding its footing on the meaning of that morning.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
The 25th anniversary of 9/11 was a solemn, name-reading ceremony meant to rise above politics but couldn’t fully escape it.
Trump’s choice to mark the day at the Pentagon instead of Ground Zero, and the targeted backlash against Mayor Mamdani over his faith, showed that even sacred national rituals remain vulnerable to division.
As fewer Americans carry direct memory of that day, how and with whom we choose to remember it is becoming as contested as the history itself.
