EditNever forget, split in two
On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, America marks the day in two cities - and still argues over what the attacks meant, and what they did not
Twenty-five years after four hijacked airliners tore a hole in the American century, the country is commemorating 11 September in two places at once, and in two registers.
At Ground Zero, families will again read the names of the 2,977 people murdered on 11 September 2001. Bells will mark the moments the planes struck and the towers fell. Four former presidents – Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden – are expected to stand in silence with Vice President JD Vance. There will be no speeches. There have not been, by design, since 2012.
At the Pentagon, President Donald Trump will speak. The New Yorker who was closer to the World Trade Center that morning than any other living president will mark the anniversary 200 miles south of the site that defined the day. The White House presents this as honour paid to another attack site. Reporting around the planning tells a more Trump-era story: he wanted to deliver remarks in Lower Manhattan; the memorial does not allow politicians to speak; he went where a microphone was waiting. Trump called that account “corrupt news,” saying the New York ceremony is meant to be solemn and that he would “love not to speak.” He is also scheduled to leave the next day for the Irish Open at his course in Doonbeg – logistics that favour a Washington morning over a New York one.
That split is the 25th anniversary in its Trump edition: names and silence in one city, a presidential address in another, arriving after a midterm convention in Dallas and a midweek Ellipse event at which Trump honoured first responders, posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Welles Crowther – the “man in the red bandana” – and folded in his war with Iran and a swipe at “communistic” politics at home.
A generation has now come of age with no living memory of the attacks. The sitting president’s absence from the reflecting pools is being read not only as a scheduling fight, but as a portrait of a country that has moved the war on terror from the centre of its politics to the edge. Fear of the next hijacked plane no longer organizes American life the way it did for a decade after 2001. China, great-power rivalry, pandemics and domestic fracture do.
New York’s own politics have not stayed outside the ropes. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, is attending the Ground Zero ceremony. Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former Governor George Pataki have said he should stay away. A petition from some victims’ relatives gathered well over 100,000 signatures. Mamdani has said the week should be about the families “whose loved ones were stolen from them” and the first responders who ran toward the fire. Days before the anniversary his administration released more than 170,000 documents on post-attack air quality—an official record of how long the public was told the air was safer than many first responders later learned it was.
The ceremony in Manhattan will still do what it has always done. The politics around it will not.
What the attacks changed – and what they didn’t
September 11 did not invent American insecurity. It ended the illusion that oceans and airliners made the homeland a sanctuary. Nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers turned commercial jets into weapons, killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, at the Pentagon and in a Pennsylvania field, and pulled the United States into a generation of war.
Within days Congress passed an Authorization for Use of Military Force that presidents have invoked ever since. NATO used Article 5 for the first and only time. The Patriot Act, the Transportation Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security and a vast surveillance architecture followed. Taking off your shoes at the airport is a small ritual with a large origin story. So is the habit of treating distant violence as a potential sequel at home.
The strategic ledger is bleaker than the first years of “never forget” allowed. The United States spent two decades and more than $2 trillion in Afghanistan; the Taliban rule Kabul again. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, sold in the shadow of 9/11 on claims about weapons of mass destruction that did not hold, remade the Middle East and helped create the conditions for later jihadist movements. Osama bin Laden is dead. So are hundreds of thousands of people who had nothing to do with his plot. Guantánamo remains open. The legal and moral arguments that began in 2001 – how far a democracy may go to prevent the next attack – never fully closed.
And yet the claim that “9/11 changed everything” has aged. China’s rise, Russia’s war in Ukraine, climate, COVID-19 and artificial intelligence have done as much or more to reorder the world. Terrorism did not become the organizing principle of the 21st century. Great-power competition did. The war on terror receded; the security state it built did not. Everyday life is more watched, more screened, more armed at the edges. The American ethos was interrupted more than it was replaced.
That is the paradox of the 25th year. The day still sits in the national calendar like a scar. The wars it launched are, for most Americans, history. The habits it installed are not.
The other afterlife: conspiracy and disinformation
The attacks also produced a second, stubborn history – one that never required a plane or a building, only a feed.
From the first weeks, claims spread that the towers were brought down by controlled demolition, that a missile rather than a jet hit the Pentagon, that the Bush administration let it happen, that Israel or “the Jews” staged a false flag. None of that is true. The 9/11 Commission, engineering studies, flight data, cockpit recordings, al-Qaeda’s own claims of responsibility and a mountain of subsequent reporting all point to the same core fact: 19 men trained and dispatched by Osama bin Laden carried out the attacks. Jews accounted for a substantial share of the dead at the World Trade Center, a fact that makes the antisemitic variants of the myth especially grotesque.
The theories have not died with the witnesses. They have been renewed. Old live television – complete with the inevitable errors of a chaotic morning – is clipped and recirculated on X, TikTok and Instagram as if a misstated casualty figure or a grainy frame were a confession. Coded antisemitism has returned with juice-box emojis and the recycled “dancing Israelis” canard. Generative AI now supplies synthetic “proof” that earlier truthers had to splice by hand. Researchers tracking online hate say 9/11 conspiracies have folded into a wider habit: treat the first account of a catastrophe as evidence that a hidden second account must exist. The same reflex was visible within hours of Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel.
This is not a harmless hobby. Conspiracy thinking does not merely insult the dead. It trains people to distrust every official record, to scapegoat minorities, and to treat uncertainty as proof of a plot. Twenty-five years on, the official story of 9/11 has been tested more thoroughly than almost any other event in modern history. The alternative stories have been tested too. They fail. They persist anyway, because platforms reward suspicion and because a massacre that large will always look, to some eyes, too large to have been the work of a terrorist cell.
The honest commemorations today are the opposite of that impulse. They are specific. They name the dead. They do not need a secret architecture behind the fire.
A quarter-century later, the U.S. is still discovering that the hardest thing about 9/11 is not remembering it. It is refusing the counterfeit versions that will not let it rest.
Caption: A display shows the names and faces of first responders who died on 11 September 2001, ahead of US President Donald J. Trump’s remarks during the Steel Across America event on the Ellipse in Washington, DC, USA, 8 September 2026. A 16,000-pound, 21-foot steel beam recovered from the South Tower of the World Trade Center is touring across 21 states from May through 11 September 2026. EPA/ANNA ROSE LAYDEN
Updated: September 11, 2026 - 06:27
