Notable Quotable: Remembering 9/11 25 Years Later
Today, in remembrance of 9/11, we're sharing the eloquent thoughts of Katie Tur who reflects on her memories of that tragic day.
"By all accounts, it was a perfect morning, 69 degrees, not a cloud in the sky…Congress was back in session. It was supposed to be any other September day. But it was not. At 8:46 in the morning, everything changed.
"At first, though, most assumed a plane accidentally hit one of the twin towers. Terrorism, yes, was always in the realm of possibility, but surely not something like this. It was not until 17 minutes later, when a second plane crashed. This time, into the other tower, the South Tower. The world realized nothing would ever be the same.
"Twenty-five years later, so many of us still remember. Manhattan being shut down. Every single bridge and tunnel connecting the city to the rest of the world closed. Hospital workers waiting for the mass casualties that never came. Missing persons, flyers, all over Lower Manhattan, abandoned cars whose owners never made it back. There was a big bang and a hard shake at the Pentagon. The whiz of a crashing plane near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. And the towers collapsing, and a cloud of dirty yellow dust. Terrifying on the ground, terrifying on the screen.
"No one knew yet that what would follow would be decades of conflict, a war on terror that killed 7,000 American soldiers, and 250,000 Iraqi and Afghan civilians. Conflict that took that brief moment of unity following the attacks, and shattered it, sowing fear and division, Islamophobia and hate, and anger toward the establishment for trapping us in a never-ending war—people said—based on lies. One that robbed us of blood and treasure, around eight trillion dollars, just as chasing the American dream here at home would cost us more and more, and more, and more.
"All told, it is not hard to draw a line from 9/11 to the rise of Make America Great Again. The movement is led by a president who claimed falsely that Muslims were cheering the attacks from the streets of Jersey City. A president who has pretended he was always against the war. One who campaigned on that stolen wisdom, and promised that with his Muslim ban, he would be the one to finally keep the terrorists out.
"The establishment failed you because it was too weak and too corrupt to tell the truth, to do the hard thing, he said. Donald Trump tapped into what had been building for 15 years: a feeling of betrayal, of fear, of anger toward Washington. The question for today, in 2026, 25 years later, is where has it all left us?"