Of all of America’s five living presidents, none was closer to ground zero on the day that hijacked planes smashed into the World Trade Center than Donald J. Trump. But on the 25th anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, none will be farther away.
Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr. are all scheduled to be in New York on Friday to mark the moment. But Mr. Trump, the only native New Yorker among them, will be some 200 miles south at the Pentagon, where, unlike at ground zero with its tradition of silence, he will be allowed to give a speech.
The disparate images will be stark and telling: four presidents of both parties standing together where the twin towers fell, four presidents whose time in office was shaped to one extent or another by the war on terrorism that gripped the nation for so long. And then the sitting president honoring the occasion at another attack site, estranged from his predecessors and governing at a time when fear of foreign attack has receded into the background of American life.
With the distance of a quarter century, Mr. Trump’s presidency has moved past the days when terrorism drove the agenda. Just as memories of Pearl Harbor lingered long after World War II ended, the memories of Sept. 11 remain powerful long after the death of Osama bin Laden. But the country and its politics have moved on.
The threat matrix delivered to the Oval Office starting after Sept. 11 now looks different than it used to. Domestic terrorism has become the more pressing concern, whether it be the mob assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the assassination of the conservative leader Charlie Kirk last year or various antisemitic attacks on synagogues.
Mr. Trump has shifted the definition and scope of the war on terrorism. He has categorized drug cartels as a terrorist threat as he bombs boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. He has identified left-wing extremism as a terrorist threat, while ignoring right-wing extremism. And he has gone to war with Iran, one of the most prolific state sponsors of terrorism, though he frames that as a campaign to stop Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon more than one meant to destroy its proxy network.
“You don’t hear President Trump talk about terrorism all that much unless they’re attaching it to issues at the border or transnational crime,” said Nick Rasmussen, who served in major counterterrorism roles under Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden. “It’s not as if they’re focused on the threat aspects of the terrorism issue. I think they’re more focused on defining that with which they are politically seized within the frame of a terrorism problem.”
Mr. Rasmussen, who was the director of the federal government’s National Counterterrorism Center through the first year of Mr. Trump’s first term and is now at the McCain Institute in Washington, said cuts and reorganizations have cost the government much expertise and resources. “I worry about the hollowing out of our institutions,” he said.
Daniel Byman, the director of the terrorism program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the issue is no longer an organizing principle the way it was under past presidents. “That kind of day-to-day focus on counterterrorism that was driving the president’s schedule and senior leaders just isn’t there,” he said.
To some extent, that reflects the success of years of bipartisan efforts after Sept. 11 to prevent another mass-casualty event of that magnitude, a victory that would have been unthinkable on Sept. 12 when another major attack was widely expected. That has allowed presidents understandably to turn to other priorities. But it always leaves the question of whether the country’s political leadership risks growing complacent.
“When people ask me, are we safer today, my answer is no,” said Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown scholar who has studied terrorism for five decades. “Twenty-five years ago, we had just one terrorist group to focus on and that was Al Qaeda. Today, we have Al Qaeda and ISIS and their branches. We have the Iranian terror network, domestic terrorists.”
“Every expansion of our definition of terrorism means resources have to be more thinly sliced,” he added. “Are we drifting back into a 1990s mind-set is always my concern.”
Americans today are more afraid of one another than they are of foreign terrorists. A survey by Reuters and Ipsos this week found that only 20 percent considered foreign terrorism the biggest threat to average Americans compared with 33 percent who cited domestic terrorism and 42 percent who picked random violence like mass shootings. Asked which ideology-driven threats were bigger, 61 percent said domestic extremists versus 34 percent who said those from overseas.
Most jihadist plots in the United States are actually carried out by individuals who may be inspired by overseas groups but have no direct connection to them. Of 129 attacks and plots in the United States over 20 years, just 23 involved known contact with an international terrorist organization, according to a study by Mr. Byman’s center last year.
“Twenty-five years later, the U.S. has largely redefined what the issue of terrorism is,” said Philip D. Zelikow, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution who served as executive director of the bipartisan commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks and later as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
For years, America was caught in a global conflict, then sought to extract itself as it pulled troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, he said. “Our major military interventions since 2024 did not reflect a strategic decision to re-engage the great conflict within the Islamic world,” Mr. Zelikow said. “We don’t have a recognizable strategy to influence the outcome of that struggle.”
Instead, the Trump administration has focused its efforts on what it calls an America First approach. The administration’s counterterrorism strategy, released in May, identified three major threats: “narcoterrorists and transnational gangs,” “legacy Islamist terrorists” and “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and antifascists.”
“We face new categories and combinations of violent actors that make the established ways of doing counterterrorism insufficient or obsolete,” the strategy said. “We face a multiplicity of deadly threats from terror groups and nonstate actors often secretly supported by governments who wish to undermine us.”
The strategy had a sharply partisan tone, repeatedly attacking Mr. Biden, saying that “real threats were ignored or underplayed” while his administration promoted a “globalist left-wing cultural hegemony.” Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser, has sought to focus on leftist extremism. After Mr. Kirk’s murder last year, he declared that “the Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”
This all represents quite a journey for Mr. Trump, who was himself a registered Democrat on the sunny autumn day 25 years ago when terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and crashed a fourth into the countryside of Pennsylvania after passengers fought back.
Mr. Trump was just a few miles away from the trade center at the time and gave an interview that day saying he could see an explosion from his window. He said that one of his buildings had been the second largest in New York before the towers fell. “Now, it’s the tallest,” he said, which actually was not true.
His other stories of that period have been factually challenged as well. He has repeatedly claimed to have gone to the attack site with a large crew of construction workers to help, an assertion that has been questioned just as repeatedly. In a speech on Tuesday, Mr. Trump even said that two firefighters physically lifted him to evacuate from an unstable nearby building, a claim for which there is no evidence. And he has spread the debunked legend that “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheered as the towers collapsed.
Mr. Trump’s decision to skip Friday’s ceremony in New York has raised eyebrows. Several people close to the situation told The New York Times that one reason Mr. Trump decided not to go to ground zero was because by tradition no speeches are given there on the anniversary and he wanted to speak. Mr. Trump has angrily denied this. Asked why he was not going to New York, he said, “because I’m going to the Pentagon.”
He did not explain why he could not go to New York as well as the Pentagon, nor would the White House when asked. On other big anniversaries, Mr. Bush (on the first and fifth), Mr. Obama (on the 10th) and Mr. Biden (on the 20th) each visited all three attack sites on the same day. Mr. Trump plans to leave on Friday after the Pentagon event for a weekend at his golf club in Doonbeg, Ireland, and one person briefed on the matter previously told The Times it would be easier for him to fly out of Joint Base Andrews outside Washington than from a commercial airport in New York.
Each of the presidents who will be in New York on Friday confronted terrorism while in office. Mr. Clinton was the first to encounter and pursue Al Qaeda, which bombed U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. Mr. Bush found his presidency completely transformed on Sept. 11 and kicked off wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mr. Obama ordered the commando raid that resulted in the killing of bin Laden, only to have the Islamic State emerge in his second term.
Mr. Biden as a senator and vice president helped shape post-Sept. 11 policy. Then as president, he pulled American forces from Afghanistan two decades after they arrived in the aftermath of the attacks on the United States, a withdrawal negotiated by Mr. Trump in his first term. The pullout allowed the Taliban to sweep back to power, a dark coda to a 20-year failed war, though Mr. Biden did succeed in killing bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahri with a drone strike in Kabul.
Mr. Trump was a private citizen through much of this until he ran for president in 2016 and vowed a tougher approach to terrorism. Unlike Mr. Bush, who emphasized that the United States was not at war with Islam and made a point of visiting a mosque shortly after Sept. 11, Mr. Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” and promised to bring back waterboarding prisoners to obtain intelligence because “torture works.”
He was tested just days after taking office in 2017 when he was asked to authorize a raid in Yemen that cost the life of a Navy Seal, a moment that advisers said shook him. He later found more confidence as he announced the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State leader, in 2019 and a couple of months later ordered the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the Iranian security and intelligence commander who organized terrorist attacks on American troops in Iraq.
Mr. Hoffman, the terrorism scholar, said both of those operations were major victories for Mr. Trump and “extremely significant.” He also said Mr. Trump “gets the highest marks of any president” for his focus on winning freedom for hostages held overseas, including by terrorist groups.
At the same time, he added, “the deprioritization of terrorism” more broadly, while “it could have been inevitable under another presidency,” has its potential perils. “All of those things, have they left us weaker?” he asked. “Only time will tell.”
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