Trump at the Pentagon: “That’s Why We Fight Today”

President Donald Trump marked the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks at the Pentagon on Friday rather than at Ground Zero in New York, where Vice President JD Vance represented the White House. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum has barred speeches at the Manhattan ceremony since 2012. Before dawn, crews unfurled the same oversized American flag first responders hung on the west wall on Sept. 12, 2001. The names of the 184 people killed when American Airlines Flight 77 struck the building were read in the courtyard. First Lady Melania Trump, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sat with survivors and families. Rain fell as the sun rose.

Trump told the crowd that 2,977 “beautiful souls were ripped from our world” that morning and that many more later died of their injuries. “Today we renew the sacred oath that we first swore in their names a quarter of a century ago: We will never, ever forget,” he said. “That’s why we fight today. We don’t have a choice. There can only be victory. We fight hard. We fight to win.” He described the post-attack weeks as a time when “we were all New Yorkers” and “all Americans,” and he praised first responders and the troops who spent 25 years in the war on terror. He then turned to forces still deployed. “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.” The line drew applause. On Fox News the night before he told Laura Ingraham that if Iran obtained a nuclear weapon, “they would use it.”

Hegseth spoke first and drew the same line more sharply. He called the passengers on United Flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, Pa., after they stormed the cockpit, “the first American counterattack of the war.” “The struggle against evil continued and it continues now,” he said. He described Iran as “an Islamic theocracy that has wished us death for nearly half a century, that cheered on 9/11,” and as a regime that sponsored attacks that killed Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Over the past six months, we have laid waste to the world’s most prolific state sponsor of terrorism,” he said. “The United States has killed their leaders, destroyed their air force, and their navy rests at the bottom of the sea. Their defenses are gone. We’re still sending terrorists where they belong, to hell, and tankers to the bottom of the ocean, where they belong.” He added that economic pressure is tightening, “We control the Strait,” and “We will finish this fight,” then closed with Todd Beamer’s words from Flight 93: “Let’s roll.”

The U.S.-Israel campaign against Iran began in late February and is in its seventh month. U.S. forces have struck IRGC launchers and oil tankers after attacks on Navy ships and mining in the Strait of Hormuz; Hegseth’s tanker line referred to that tanker-for-tanker policy. The administration still describes Iran as the leading state sponsor of terrorism, a designation the State Department has applied for decades. Rice, who was national security adviser on the day of the attacks, recalled the minutes when the White House thought U.S. fighters had shot down Flight 93. Caine spoke as well. Trump said the country is “winning that test very handily.” After the ceremony he was scheduled to leave from Joint Base Andrews rather than the New York area. Former presidents Bush, Clinton, and Obama attended the New York reading of names.