President Donald Trump on Friday delivered words of comfort at a solemn Pentagon ceremony marking the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and edged close to embracing policies he has long criticized — a measure of the distance he has traveled since deploying U.S. military power in the six-month-old war in Iran.
The president marked the 25th anniversary of the attacks by praising the country for coming together in the aftermath of the tragedy. As he did so, he linked his Iran policy with the George W. Bush administration’s “war on terror.” The words marked a striking shift for a leader who rose to power in part on his willingness to criticize the invasion of Iraq that followed the 9/11 attacks, illustrating how being the commander in chief of the world’s most powerful military can alter even the sharpest critic of war.
“Today we renew the sacred oath that we first swore in their names a quarter of a century ago: We will never, ever forget. That’s why we fight today. We don’t have a choice,” Trump said. “On days like 9/11, we learn what a country is truly made of. We’re learning right now what we’re made of, and we have to be strong and we have to be smart.”
The president and first lady Melania Trump walked onto the dais at the Pentagon shortly after 9 a.m. Announcers read out the names of the 184 men, women and children who perished in the Pentagon attack, sounding a bell after each person.
Over 18 minutes of remarks, Trump addressed the tragedy of the attacks and the sacrifices that Americans made in their wake. But he returned repeatedly to his own decision to attack Iran in February, a war that he says was necessary to prevent Tehran from building a nuclear weapon but that his critics say recapitulated some of the foreign policy mistakes that followed 9/11.
Bush took the United States into war in Afghanistan and Iraq, conflicts that cost trillions of dollars, cost thousands of American lives and those of many more Afghans and Iraqis, and soured many citizens on engaging in nation-building and attempting to reshape faraway societies.
In his first presidential run in 2016, Trump stood out in the Republican field for his criticism of Bush, calling the war in Iraq the “worst decision” in presidential history.
Friday’s remarks, by contrast, came closer than he ever has to embracing the policies of Bush and President Barack Obama, another war critic who largely wound down the U.S. presence in Iraq but kept fighting in Afghanistan.
It came as Trump was physically separated from all four of his living predecessors, who marked the day at Ground Zero in New York.
“For 25 years, our best and bravest have kept America safe, and today we salute every member of the United States military who served in the war on terror. It is a war on sick, horrible terror,” Trump said. “We salute the service members working right now to ensure the world’s number one sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran, will never ever have a nuclear weapon.”
He added: “We’ve been tested many times. We’re being tested today, and we’re winning that test very handily.”
The ceremony was a subdued commemoration of the tragedy that reshaped the country and ultimately played a significant role in Trump’s first successful presidential run.
In his years in office, Trump has curtailed Washington’s commitments to its allies. And in his second term, he brought veterans — and critics — of the Bush-era wars into his Cabinet: Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose political lives were shaped by their decision to enlist in the military after the attacks.
But the president this year launched what has become an extended war against Iran that has stretched far longer than he initially vowed, as Tehran has proved a more resilient foe than the president expected. The war has started to shadow Trump’s presidency much as Bush’s Middle East wars ultimately defined his.
Trump’s address on Friday called up his own memories of the day and paid tribute to the sacrifices of those who lost their lives at the Pentagon, in New York, and aboard United Airlines Flight 93, whose passengers brought down the jet in Pennsylvania and sacrificed their own lives when they realized their hijackers intended to use the plane for another attack.
“Americans are made of a goodness and spirit that can transcend any earthly force, and that’s what we’re doing better than anyone else has ever been able to do it,” Trump said.
Ahead of his remarks, during the reading of the names, Trump at times appeared to be struggling to keep his eyes open. The president got back to the White House at about 2:30 a.m. on Friday from a trip to Dallas, where he spoke at a Republican convention ahead of November’s midterm elections.
Trump was joined at the commemoration by senior members of his Cabinet. Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sat with him on the podium, along with former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who was Bush’s national security adviser at the time of the attacks.
Vance attended the Manhattan commemoration at the site of the World Trade Center along with former presidents. Presidents by tradition have not spoken at the New York ceremony in an attempt to keep the event nonpartisan.
Ahead of Trump’s remarks, Hegseth repeatedly denounced “Islamic terrorists” in his remarks. Caine spoke of the way Americans came together in the aftermath of the attacks.
“Twenty-five years ago, in the moment of greatest danger, Americans moved towards one another,” he said, speaking of his memories of the attack, when he was an Air Force pilot tasked with taking down any commercial airplane that entered the airspace around Washington.
Rice recalled her fears as she tried unsuccessfully to reach Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and watched the gaping hole in the Pentagon on television.
She also spoke of the power of America’s alliances — NATO, which for the first time in its history, responded to the attack on the United States as though it were an attack on all its members, and deployed to Afghanistan. And Canada, where “ordinary citizens took in stranded travelers, complete strangers.”
Her words stood in contrast to the president’s attitudes toward NATO and Canada, which he has attacked for what he says is taking advantage of the United States. He said recently that Canada is a bigger U.S. adversary than China or Russia.
The president did not repeat claims he made earlier this week that he played a significant role in the response to the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, where in 2001 he was a real estate developer. He made those disputed claims earlier this week as he awarded the Medal of Freedom posthumously to Welles Crowther, a 24-year-old equities trader and volunteer firefighter who saved an estimated 18 people before dying in the South Tower.
Richard Alles, a retired New York City Fire Department battalion chief, told PolitiFact in 2019 that he had “no knowledge” of Trump being at the site in the immediate aftermath of the attack. No record appears to exist of Trump sending a crew of 100 workers, as the president has said he did. Alles said that records would have tracked a recovery contribution of that size.
Trump returned to the White House after the ceremony on Friday. He plans to fly to Ireland late Friday, where he is expected to spend the weekend watching a golf tournament at the resort he owns there and meet Irish leaders before returning to Washington.
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