Vice President JD Vance told a Republican rally in Sterling Heights, Michigan, on Monday, August 31, 2026, that the country was about to “celebrate” the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. He swapped the word out mid-sentence, but the clip had already left the room, and the mockery online has not let up since.
“We’re about to celebrate the 25th year,” Vance said, catching himself and substituting the word commemorate. The country, he continued, would celebrate the brave heroes who made it, and he added that as terrible as the attacks were, they could have been far worse.
Vance, 42, had come to Macomb County to stump for two candidates carrying President Donald Trump’s endorsement: the party’s nominee for governor, Rep. John James, and its Senate nominee, Mike Rogers. Someone clipped the video and posted it to X, where the mocking commentary poured in.
The event doubled as the first rally staged by MAGA Inc., Trump’s SuperPAC, and drew over 300 people to Universal Contracting Services and Urban Tree Trimming. Vance devoted over a third of his roughly 30-minute speech to attacking Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed over comments about second lady Usha Vance. “Whatever you want to talk about, Abdul, keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth because she’s way out of your league,” he said.
Backlash Over a Single Word
Reaction came fast and broke mostly along partisan lines. One user cracked wise about what a person might wear to a 9/11 anniversary party. Angrier posts made the point in earnest: Americans do not celebrate the attacks — they honor the dead. Another poster described the annual observance as a day set aside for mourning, reflection and thanks to those who died searching for survivors, and said anyone in a position of authority has an obligation to choose words carefully.
Conservative media came in for the obvious counterfactual from other posters, who asked how those outlets would have reacted to the same phrasing from a Democratic politician. Vance’s political future became the verdict a few drew from the slip; one user predicted flatly that he would never win the presidency. Plenty of posts conceded only that celebrate had been a poor word choice in an otherwise unremarkable stretch of stump speech.
Fewer than two weeks separate the stumble from the anniversary itself. Al-Qaida-linked terrorists hijacked four passenger jets on September 11, 2001, flying two into the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York City, a third into the Pentagon and a fourth into a Pennsylvania field. The dead numbered 2,977, 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.
This is not the first Vance ad-lib to go viral for the wrong reasons. He labeled Canada a state on August 24, in the middle of the trade dispute with the country, then called it a Freudian slip.
Trump Will Mark the Day at the Pentagon
The gaffe also landed while a separate flap over the administration’s plans for the anniversary was already under way. Reporting on August 28 revealed that Trump, 80, will skip the ceremony at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, the Lower Manhattan site built on the footprint of the destroyed twin towers. Political speeches have been barred from the memorial’s grounds since 2012, a rule meant to keep the observance nonpartisan. Trump intends to speak, so he will mark the day at the Pentagon instead, sending Vance to the World Trade Center ceremony in his place.
“As a proud New Yorker, President Trump has spoken about his own experiences watching the horrific events of September 11, 2001,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said. Those killed by the terrorists will be in the president’s remarks, she added, along with an honoring of their families and a tribute to the first responders who risked their lives to rescue fellow Americans.
On Thursday, September 3, Vance hosted the first White House press briefing since press secretary Karoline Leavitt stepped down, and a reporter asked why he, rather than Trump, would be at the Ground Zero ceremony. “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. to commemorate what happened at the Pentagon,” he said. On a security concern, he said, “I don’t think it’s a special security concern… that’s not what I’ve heard,” adding that he would follow up with the Secret Service.
At the same September 3 briefing, Vance joked about Joe Biden, who is expected at the New York ceremony with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “I’m also, as you guys can probably guess, I’m really looking forward to hanging out with Joe Biden,” he said. He added, “I’m sure that we’ll have many, many intense intellectual conversations.” Biden is undergoing treatment for prostate cancer.
News of the Pentagon arrangement broke when Maggie Haberman, a New York Times reporter, and three colleagues reported that Trump would skip the Ground Zero ceremony. Trump hit back in public, deriding Haberman with an insulting mangling of her surname. That same reporting said the president plans to attend the Irish Open that weekend.
A Second Round of Backlash Over the Biden Joke
The Biden quip drew its own wave of criticism on September 3–4. Fred Guttenberg, whose brother died of pancreatic cancer after serving as a 9/11 first responder, said: “The more I watch this, the more p—ed I get.” Former Obama national security staffer Tommy Vietor wrote on X: “Vance is such a prick.” Missouri Democratic congressional candidate Fred Wellman called Vance a “pathetic worm of a man.”
Polling Pressure Ahead of November
The administration is absorbing all of it at an unforgiving moment. CNN displayed polling figures on August 31 that put Trump’s net approval rating at -32 percentage points and the Republican Party at -21. Public surveys do not always track private polling, Haberman said on air, but the president is popular in no poll, and none shows him out of trouble on affordability. An unusual midterm convention is Trump’s plan, and CNN host Kaitlan Collins noted that some Republicans oppose it because it drags them off the campaign trail; Haberman countered that Democrats would also be handed fresh material for ads.
Against that backdrop, the Michigan appearance was built to do a job. Organizers wanted a battleground-state rally, two Trump-endorsed candidates and a patriotic set piece ahead of the anniversary. Instead, critics walked away with a seven-word slip they have used to argue that the vice president is careless with language on subjects that demand precision.
