Vice President JD Vance told a Republican rally in Sterling Heights, Michigan, on Monday, August 31, 2026, that Americans were about to “celebrate” the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. He swapped the word out mid-sentence, but the clip had already escaped the room, and the ridicule online has not let up since.
“We’re about to celebrate the 25th year,” Vance said at the rally, catching himself an instant later and substituting the word commemorate. The full sentence ran: “We’re about to celebrate the 25th year, or … commemorate the 25th year, of those terrible terrorist attacks, and celebrate all those brave heroes who made it; frankly, as terrible as it was, it could’ve been so much worse.”
Rep. John James, the party’s nominee for governor, and Mike Rogers, its Senate nominee, were the two candidates endorsed by President Donald Trump whom the vice president, 42, had come to Macomb County to stump for. Within hours, the remark had been clipped and posted to X, where the mocking commentary piled up.
Backlash Over a Single Word
The pile-on was fast, and it broke largely along partisan lines. One user joked about what a person might wear to a 9/11 anniversary party. Others took it more seriously, arguing that Americans do not celebrate the attacks — they honor the dead. Another post said people in positions of authority have to choose their words carefully. That annual observance, the post added, is a day given over to mourning and reflection, and to thanking those who died searching for survivors.
Conservative media supplied the obvious counterfactual for some critics, who asked how those outlets would have reacted had a Democratic politician used the same phrasing. Others treated the slip as a judgment on where Vance’s political career is headed, and one user predicted flatly that he would never win the presidency. Several posts allowed only that the word celebrate had been a poor choice in a stretch of stump speech that was otherwise unremarkable.
The anniversary itself was less than two weeks away when the stumble landed. Al-Qaida-linked terrorists hijacked four passenger jets on September 11, 2001. The hijackers flew two of them into the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York City, one into the Pentagon and one into a Pennsylvania field. In all, 2,977 people died, among them 343 firefighters and 72 law enforcement personnel. Thousands more were injured, and a quarter-century later survivors and responders are still contending with long-term health problems.
Vance has been here before. At an event in Brewer, Maine, on August 24, amid the trade dispute, he called Canada a state: “We have to remember, Canada is a state — sorry, Freudian slip. That was actually an accident.”
A James Attack Ad Draws Its Own Condemnation
One of the candidates Vance had come to Sterling Heights to boost then generated a 9/11 controversy of his own. James, the Michigan Republican gubernatorial nominee, released a 9/11-themed attack ad against his Democratic opponent, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, that drew widespread condemnation on September 11. In it James says: “Jocelyn Benson stands with a radical left that says America deserved 9/11. I stand with you, and I say never forget,” over a photo of Benson with Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed. Raw Story reports that Benson has never campaigned with influencer Hasan Piker, who made the “America deserved 9/11” remark in 2019, though El-Sayed did.
Benson delivered a scathing rebuke in a post on X dated September 10, writing: “How dare you, Congressman. My husband enlisted in the Army and put his life on the line for our country after losing his friend, Todd Ouida, in the towers on 9/11.” She had also condemned Piker’s remarks as “reprehensible” on Thursday, September 10.
Democratic strategist Mike Nellis wrote on X on Friday: “Benson’s husband enlisted in the Army after his friend died on 9/11, I believe. What a disgusting attack from James.” Forbes contributor and attorney Sophia Nelson called the ad “vile” and “disgusting,” and political consultant Matt Dearing called it “lower than dirt behavior.”
A Biden Joke Adds to the Anger
Vance took the White House podium on September 3 to host a press briefing — the administration’s first in 42 days, the last having been given by press secretary Karoline Leavitt on July 23. Leavitt announced her departure August 12, saying she could not be the mother her two young children deserved while doing the job, and worked her final day August 27. The post remains vacant, which is why the vice president was at the lectern at all. There he turned to former President Joe Biden, 83, who has aggressive prostate cancer. “I’m really looking forward to hanging out with Joe Biden,” Vance said. “I’m sure that we’ll have many, many intense intellectual conversations and, you know, it’ll be great.”
The spread of Biden’s cancer to his bones was disclosed when the diagnosis was announced in May 2025, and he completed a five-week course of radiation on October 20 of that year, alongside hormone therapy. His son Hunter told the BBC on August 8 that the disease had metastasized “into his bones and further,” and called it painful and debilitating. Biden himself said on September 8 that the radiation had worked as intended, marking Prostate Cancer Awareness Month with a call for men to get screened.
Earlier in the same briefing, he had spoken about attending the reading of the names at the World Trade Center in 2024, during the campaign, with his family. “It’s one of the most amazing experiences of my life, and I encourage every American, particularly the people who are young enough to not really remember that day, just to tune in for a couple of hours and see what it meant,” he said. He was describing the commemoration ceremony, not the site.
Fresh condemnation followed that same day, September 3. Tommy Vietor, a former Obama national security staffer, wrote on X: “Vance is such a prick.” Fred Wellman, who won the Democratic nomination in Missouri’s 2nd Congressional District on August 4, called Vance a “pathetic worm of a man.” And Fred Guttenberg — whose brother, Dr. Michael Guttenberg, an emergency physician and 9/11 first responder, died of pancreatic cancer in 2017 — called the vice president “sewer dwelling scum,” writing: “JD, my brother didn’t die to enable sewer dwelling scum like you.”
Trump Will Mark the Day at the Pentagon
A separate flap over how the administration will observe the anniversary was already under way when the gaffe arrived. Reporting on August 27 revealed that Trump, 80, will skip the ceremony in Lower Manhattan at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, a site that sits on the footprint of the destroyed twin towers. Since 2012, the memorial has prohibited political speeches on its grounds, keeping the observance nonpartisan, and because Trump intends to speak, he will mark the day at the Pentagon instead, sending Vance to the World Trade Center ceremony in his place. There, the vice president will join all four living former presidents — Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
White House principal deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement, “As a proud New Yorker, President Trump has spoken about his own experiences watching the horrific events of September 11, 2001.” Those killed by the terrorists will be remembered by the president, she added, who will honor their families and pay tribute to the first responders who risked their lives to rescue fellow Americans.
At the September 3 briefing, a reporter asked Vance why he, and not Trump, would be at the Ground Zero ceremony. “I don’t think it’s a special security concern. We’ll follow up with the Secret Service to get you an actual answer on that. That’s not what I’ve heard,” he said.
Explaining the split, Vance told reporters: “We just decided as a team that I would go to New York for 9/11 and the president would stay here in D.C., of course, to commemorate what happened at the Pentagon, because that was a critical part of the tragedy of 9/11 as well.”
New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Dana Rubinstein and Sally Goldenberg made the arrangement public on August 27, reporting that Trump would skip the Ground Zero ceremony. Trump hit back the next day on Truth Social, calling Haberman a “scammer” and writing: “This is more Corrupt News, I’ve been to New York many times over the years, and no one ever speaks, it’s a ‘solemn ceremony!’ I never even thought of what Maggot made up.” The president is scheduled to travel to his golf course in Doonbeg, Ireland, on September 12, the day after the anniversary, for the Irish Open, according to the same reporting.
Polling Pressure Ahead of November
For the administration, the timing is unforgiving. CNN displayed polling figures on August 31 that put Trump’s net approval rating at -32 percentage points, with the Republican Party at -21. Discussing the numbers on air, Haberman said public surveys do not always track private polling, but that there is no poll in which the president is popular and none in which he is not in trouble on affordability. CNN host Kaitlan Collins noted that some Republicans are not behind the party’s midterm convention in Dallas, which opened Wednesday, September 9, at the American Airlines Center and runs through Thursday, because they think it takes them off the campaign trail. Vance is scheduled to speak there tonight, an hour ahead of Trump. The National Republican Congressional Committee asked House members to contribute at least $25,000 to attend, and dozens in the closest races are skipping it; the committee’s chairman, Rep. Richard Hudson, later said there were “plenty of tickets” and distributed 2,000 free ones. Haberman countered on air that the convention would also hand Democrats fresh material for ads.
Trump has been marking the anniversary in his own way this week. He spoke on Tuesday, September 8, at a ceremony on the White House Ellipse with the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, beside a 21-foot, 16,000-pound beam recovered from the South Tower. “We will never forget,” he said, and described seeing “things that I never want to see again.” He posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Welles Crowther, the equities trader known as the Man in the Red Bandana, who died helping others out of the South Tower, and announced that a Coast Guard cutter would be commissioned in memory of the firefighter Jeffrey Palazzo. He goes to the Pentagon on Friday. The Lower Manhattan ceremony has meanwhile drawn a row of its own, with George Pataki, Rudy Giuliani and some victims’ families objecting to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to attend; a petition seeking to keep him away passed 100,000 signatures on September 8, and Mamdani has said he will be there. Gov. Kathy Hochul has backed him.
No public response from Vance or the White House to either the slip or the Biden remark has been reported. Against that backdrop, the Michigan appearance had a job to do: a battleground-state rally, two Trump-endorsed candidates and a patriotic set piece with the anniversary approaching. Instead, the event produced a seven-word slip, which critics have seized on to argue that the vice president is careless with language on subjects that demand precision.
