While people continue to die at the World Trade Center in New York, the campaign for the American presidency does not stop the memory of theSeptember 11th.
In the aftermath of last night’s duel in Philadelphia against Donald Trump, Kamala Harris will be at Ground Zero and other sites of the massacres alongside Joe Bidenthe president who gave her the White House in July. Trump is also considering it, but the plans are not yet clear. The former president’s campaign is considering a move to the former World Trade Center, the New York Times has learned.
The former builder, who ran as a candidate in 2016, is the only candidate in the November race with roots in New York, in addition to having cultivated close ties with former Mayor Rudy Giuliani for years: “He was right about a lot of things,” he said last week about his former collaborator, who was on the front lines during the massacres, then fell from grace and was struck off the bar last July for lying about the 2020 vote.
Trump has a complicated relationship with the former World Trade Center: after boasting about having gone down to Ground Zero with rescue workers and being near a building that was in danger of collapsing, the former president then built his political brand over the next two decades by leveraging anti-Islamic and xenophobic sentiments and divisions within his own party over the wars in the Middle East. In 2021, after being out of the White House for a few months, The Donald skipped the official ceremony at Ground Zero, instead focusing on visits to firefighters and police officers before returning to Florida to commentate on a boxing match: it was said at the time that he had disrespected the memory of the victims.
Harris was at the gym in California that morning in 2001.: like many in the US and around the world, she watched in disbelief as images of the attack flashed on TV, she said four years ago during a commemoration in Fairfax, Virginia. Tomorrow, after standing at Ground Zero alongside Biden, the Democratic candidate will stop at the Pentagon and Stonycreek, near the Shanksville airfield in Pennsylvania, where Flight 93, hijacked by terrorists, crashed. Pennsylvania is a key state in the November vote, and she will return there on Friday for rallies in Johnstown and Wilkes-Barre.
Meanwhile in New York at the World Trade Center people continue to die: The illnesses that struck firefighters who responded that morning killed 360 members of the New York City Fire Department, 17 more than the 343 who died the day of the attacks. “The losses at the World Trade Center are not over,” said Fire Chief Robert Tucker.