Vice President JD Vance is absorbing a wave of online ridicule after telling a Republican rally in Sterling Heights, Michigan, on Monday, August 31, 2026, that Americans were about to “celebrate” the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks — a word he swapped out mid-sentence, but not before the clip escaped the room.
“We’re about to celebrate the 25th year,” Vance said, before catching himself and substituting the word commemorate. He went on to say the country would celebrate the brave heroes who made it, adding that as terrible as the attacks were, they could have been far worse.
Vance, 42, was in Macomb County campaigning for two candidates endorsed by President Donald Trump: Rep. John James, the party’s nominee for governor, and Mike Rogers, its Senate nominee. Video of the remark was quickly clipped and shared on X, where it drew a torrent of mocking commentary.
Backlash Over a Single Word
The pile-on was swift and largely partisan in flavor. One user joked about what a person might wear to a 9/11 anniversary party. Others were less amused, arguing that Americans do not celebrate the attacks — they honor the dead. One post argued that people in positions of authority have to choose their words carefully, calling the annual observance a day set aside for mourning, reflection and thanks to those who died searching for survivors.
Some critics reached for the obvious counterfactual, asking how conservative media would have reacted had a Democratic president used the same phrasing. Others turned the slip into a verdict on Vance’s political future, with one user predicting flatly that he would never win the presidency. A number of posts conceded only that the word celebrate had been a poor word choice in an otherwise unremarkable stretch of stump speech.
The stumble landed less than two weeks before the anniversary itself. On September 11, 2001, al-Qaida-linked terrorists hijacked four passenger jets, crashing two into the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York City, one into the Pentagon and one into a Pennsylvania field. The attacks killed 2,977 people, among them 343 firefighters and 72 law enforcement personnel. Thousands more were injured, and survivors and responders are still contending with long-term health problems a quarter-century later.
It is not the first time a Vance ad-lib has gone viral for the wrong reasons. On August 24, during the trade dispute with Canada, he referred to the country as a state, then called it a Freudian slip.
Trump Will Mark the Day at the Pentagon
The gaffe also arrived in the middle of a separate flap over how the administration will observe the anniversary. Reporting on August 28 revealed that Trump, 80, will not attend the ceremony at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in Lower Manhattan, which sits on the footprint of the destroyed twin towers. The memorial has prohibited political speeches on its grounds since 2012 to keep the observance nonpartisan. Because Trump intends to speak, he will mark the day at the Pentagon instead, with Vance attending 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. She added that the president will remember those killed by the terrorists, honor their families and pay tribute to the first responders who risked their lives to rescue fellow Americans.
The arrangement became public when New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman and three colleagues reported that Trump would skip the Ground Zero ceremony. Trump responded by publicly deriding Haberman with an insulting mangling of her surname. The same reporting said the president plans to attend the Irish Open that weekend.
Polling Pressure Ahead of November
The stumble comes at an unforgiving moment for the administration. Polling figures displayed on CNN on August 31 put Trump’s net approval rating at -32 percentage points, with the Republican Party at -21. Haberman, discussing the numbers on air, said public surveys do not always track private polling, but that there is no poll in which the president is popular and none in which he is not in trouble on affordability. CNN host Kaitlan Collins noted that some Republicans oppose Trump’s plan for an unusual midterm convention because it drags them off the campaign trail; Haberman countered that it would also hand Democrats fresh material for ads.
That is the backdrop against which Vance’s Michigan appearance was designed to work: a battleground-state rally, two Trump-endorsed candidates and a patriotic set piece ahead of the anniversary. Instead, the clearest takeaway from the event was a seven-word slip that critics have used to argue the vice president is careless with language on subjects that demand precision.
As of reporting on September 1, neither Vance nor the White House had publicly revisited the remark. The plan laid out in the August 28 report still calls for the vice president to represent the administration at the World Trade Center ceremony on September 11, while the president speaks at the Pentagon — meaning Vance’s next public words about the attacks will be delivered at the memorial itself, in front of the families of the dead.