Trump, absent from the 25th anniversary commemoration of 9/11 in New York
Mamdani attends the memorial that has been held at Ground Zero despite the Islamophobic attacks of the last few days
WashingtonGeorge W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The twenty-five years following the 9/11 attack would have been condensed this Friday at the New York memorial if it hadn't been for Donald Trump's absence. The current president of the United States, despite being the only native New Yorker, was thousands of miles away on such a sensitive date. The Republican decided to stay in Washington for the Pentagon commemoration, which was also a target of the Al-Qaeda terrorists. Unlike at Ground Zero, where the organization prohibited politicians from giving speeches, Trump took the opportunity to once again defend his war in Iran.
“Today we renew the sacred oath we took a quarter of a century ago. Never, never will we forget. That is why we are fighting today. We have no choice. There can only be victory. We fight with all our might. We fight to win,” said Trump, who wanted to put himself back at the center of the collective history, even though the date belongs to the nearly 3,000 civilians and more than 300 firefighters who lost their lives there. The American president at no point wanted to explain why, unlike his predecessors, he decided not to go to New York on a date as symbolic as the 25th anniversary. Obama was at the World Trade Center area when the ten-year mark of the attacks was reached.
Trump has denied that the reason for his absence from the New York event is because speeches are not allowed. Although both today and Tuesday the president made it clear that he had not had enough with the Republican convention this same week in Dallas: he also had to be the protagonist of the commemoration of one of the country's great collective traumas. On Tuesday, at the event the White House organized at the Ellipse to present a posthumous medal to Welles Crowther, a 24-year-old volunteer firefighter who managed to rescue 18 people before the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed, the president said the following: “The man with the red bandana [Crowther] has become more famous than me. I don't like it.”
As if that were not enough, he repeated his dubious version of the events of that day, claiming that he sent a hundred workers to Ground Zero to help with the reconstruction efforts. There is no record of this fact and the White House has avoided commenting on these statements. At least this Friday, Trump spared himself those comments, although he drew a clear contrast with 2001: twenty-five years after the attacks that began the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, the country has once again entered into a conflict in the Middle East.
Mamdani and a wound that remains open
The anniversary of the attacks has also been marked by attacks against the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani. Twenty-five years after the Islamophobic wave that spread throughout the United States – and a good part of the Western world –, the city has its first Muslim mayor. But the symbolic milestone has not closed the circle, on the contrary: allies of Trump like Rudy Giuliani – who was mayor at the time of the attacks – have led a boycott campaign asking that Mamdani stay away from the events due to his religion. Relatives of the victims also signed a petition to the same effect: that the current mayor abstain from the events for being a "controversial" figure and for his "radical" political stance.
Mamdani, who was nine years old and studying in school when the attacks happened –like so many other Muslims in the city–, had to grow up amidst this sentiment of Islamophobia. Despite the lynching campaign, the mayor has avoided entering into the controversy and has focused on remembering the victims and putting New Yorkers at the center. At the beginning of the week, he made public more than 170,000 pages of reports, documents, and correspondence that, as a whole, show how the authorities at the time, desperate to get Wall Street working again, deceived New Yorkers about the dangers that still persisted. “People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them it was safe to breathe that toxic air,” Mamdani declared on Tuesday.
This Friday, during the reading of the victims' names, Mamdani, conciliatory, approached Giuliani to shake his hand despite the attacks he has leveled against him.