Today, September 11, 2026, the country is stopping to remember one of the darkest mornings in American history, the day terror attacks claimed the lives of 2,977 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
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For many, 9/11 isn’t just a date in a history book. It’s the day everything changed. The way we fly. The way we see the sky. The way we hug our people a little tighter. And a quarter century later, the pain hasn’t packed up and just left. Another 9,000 people have died from illnesses tied to 9/11 over the last 25 years. Folks who breathed in toxic dust while searching for survivors or clearing the wreckage, and paid for it with their health.
Today also marks the largest wave of remembrance the country has held since the attacks themselves happened. Bells are tolling. Names are being read out loud. And seven moments of silence are marking the exact times the towers were hit, when they fell, when the Pentagon was struck, when Flight 93 went down, plus a new moment added this year to honor those lost to 9/11 related illness.
What’s happening right now at Ground Zero
As of this morning, the ceremony at the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan is officially underway. It kicked off around 8:30 a.m. Eastern, and right now family members are standing at the podium reading the names of the 2,983 people killed in the 2001 attacks and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, one by one, out loud, the same way it’s been done every year since the beginning.
Who’s actually there? A packed house of history. Vice President JD Vance is in attendance, alongside four former presidents — Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.
And standing right there with them is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the guy who’s been at the center of weeks of controversy just for planning to show up.
Notably absent from Ground Zero: President Donald Trump. He’s attending the 9/11 ceremony at the Pentagon in Virginia instead, alongside Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, marking the second year in a row he’s chosen the Pentagon over Lower Manhattan.
Beyond the politicians, it’s really about the families. Thousands of relatives, survivors, and first responders are gathered on the plaza, many of them returning year after year to say the names, lay the flowers, and pass the memory down to kids who weren’t even born when it happened. Because at the end of the day, that’s what today is really about not the politics swirling around it, but nearly 3,000 people who never got to come home, and the folks who still show up for them, every single September.