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U.S. President Donald Trump marked the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks Friday by linking the country’s post-9/11 fight against terrorism to the ongoing U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran.
Speaking at the Pentagon alongside First Lady Melania Trump, Trump said the United States would never forget the nearly 3,000 people killed in the attacks.
“Today we renew the sacred oath that we first swore in their names a quarter of a century ago. We will never, ever forget. That’s why we fight today,” Trump said.
“We don’t have a choice. There can only be victory. We fight hard. We fight to win.”
Trump did not attend the main commemorations in New York, where most of the 2,977 victims were killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center.
At the Pentagon, where one of the hijacked planes struck on Sept. 11, the 184 people killed there were remembered with a bell toll as their names were read.
Trump connected the “War on Terror,” launched under former President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks, with the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, now in its seventh month.
“Today we salute every member of the United States military who served in the ‘War on Terror.’ It is a war on sick, horrible terror,” Trump said.
“And 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.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also criticized Iran during the Pentagon ceremony.
“Over the past six months, we have laid waste to the world’s most prolific state sponsor of terrorism,” Hegseth said. “Our warriors have fought an Islamic theocracy that has wished us death for nearly half a century.”
The Iran conflict has reached a stalemate, with Tehran largely maintaining control of the Strait of Hormuz and oil prices remaining high despite sporadic exchanges of fire with the United States.
Trump also turned to domestic politics a day after a Republican convention ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, where he and Vice President JD Vance accused Democrats of sympathizing with the 9/11 attackers.
“A generation after 9/11, we also know that the final response to those atrocities and the ultimate victory over the perpetrators will not be found on a foreign battlefield,” Trump said.
While recounting the story of a firefighter killed on Sept. 11 whose son later became a U.S. Navy veteran, Trump said it showed that “we can be a nation whose heroes are not fanatics for an abstract cause.”
Trump had used similar language at the Republican convention Wednesday, saying: “With your vote in this election, you can tell these far-left lunatics and fanatics that America is not for sale to them or to anybody else.”
Republicans at the convention also repeatedly criticized Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed over his previous social media posts about 9/11.
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