Vice President JD Vance was working a Republican rally in Sterling Heights, Michigan, on Monday, August 31, 2026, when he told the crowd Americans were about to “celebrate” the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. He swapped the word out mid-sentence — too late, because the clip had already left the room, and the ridicule online has not stopped since.

“We’re about to celebrate the 25th year,” Vance said, then caught himself and substituted the word commemorate. The country, he continued, would celebrate the brave heroes who made it, and he said that as terrible as the attacks were, they could have been far worse.

Rep. John James, the party’s nominee for governor, and Mike Rogers, its Senate nominee, are two candidates endorsed by President Donald Trump, and Vance, 42, had come to Macomb County to campaign for them. Someone clipped the video and posted it to X, where the mocking commentary poured in.

The Sterling Heights event on August 31 doubled as the first rally staged by MAGA Inc., Trump’s SuperPAC, and drew over 300 people. Vance spent over a third of his nearly 30-minute speech attacking Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed over remarks about 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 it broke largely along partisan lines. One user riffed on what a person might wear to a 9/11 anniversary party. Others took it more seriously, arguing Americans do not celebrate the attacks — they honor the dead. Another post said people in positions of authority have to choose their words carefully, describing the annual observance as a day set aside for mourning, reflection and thanks to those who died searching for survivors.

The obvious counterfactual surfaced too, with critics asking how conservative media would have reacted had a Democratic politician used the same phrasing. Some treated the slip as a career forecast, and one user predicted flatly that Vance would never win the presidency. Others allowed only that celebrate was a poor word choice in an otherwise unremarkable stretch of stump speech.

The stumble came less than two weeks ahead of the anniversary itself. Terrorists linked to al-Qaida 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 death toll reached 2,977, among them 343 firefighters and 72 law enforcement personnel. Thousands more were injured, and a quarter-century later, responders and survivors are still contending with long-term health problems.

Earlier ad-libs from the vice president have traveled for the wrong reasons as well. The trade dispute with Canada supplied one on August 24, when he described Canada as a state and then labeled the wording a Freudian slip.

Trump Will Mark the Day at the Pentagon

A separate flap over how the administration will observe the anniversary was already under way when the remark landed. Trump, 80, will not attend the ceremony at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in Lower Manhattan, according to reporting on August 28; the site sits on the footprint of the destroyed twin towers. Since 2012 the memorial has prohibited political speeches on its grounds to keep the observance nonpartisan, and Trump intends to speak — so the Pentagon will host him for the day instead, and Vance will attend the World Trade Center ceremony in his place. There, the vice president will join all four living former presidents: Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said, “As a proud New Yorker, President Trump has spoken about his own experiences watching the horrific events of September 11, 2001.” Those killed by the terrorists will be in the president’s remembrance, she said, along with honor for their families and tribute to the first responders who risked their lives to rescue fellow Americans.

The report that Trump would skip the Ground Zero ceremony carried the bylines of New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman and three colleagues. He hit back by publicly deriding Haberman with an insulting mangling of her surname. Their reporting also said the president plans to attend the Irish Open that weekend.

Vance Takes Questions at the Briefing

Vance ran the White House press briefing on Thursday, September 3 — his first since press secretary Karoline Leavitt stepped down — and reporters asked why he, not Trump, would attend the Ground Zero ceremony, and whether security was the reason. “I don’t think it’s a special security concern… that’s not what I’ve heard,” the vice president said, adding that he would follow up with the Secret Service.

He explained the split at the same briefing: “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.”

Vance also joked about Biden, 83, who is undergoing prostate cancer treatment and is expected at the New York ceremony. “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 and, um, you know, it’ll be great. We’ll have a great time with Joe Biden and the other presidents.”

Fred Guttenberg, an author and gun-safety advocate whose brother died of pancreatic cancer after serving as a 9/11 first responder, said of the joke: “The more I watch this, the more p—ed I get.”

Tommy Vietor, a former Obama national security staffer, wrote on X on September 3: “Vance is such a prick. Biden is undergoing cancer treatment, but glad JD could use the anniversary of 9/11 to take a cheap shot at him.”

Polling Pressure Ahead of November

All of it arrives at an unforgiving moment for the administration. CNN displayed figures on August 31 giving Trump a net approval rating of -32 percentage points and the Republican Party -21. Haberman discussed those numbers on air, saying 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. Some Republicans oppose Trump’s plan for an unusual midterm convention because it drags them off the campaign trail, CNN host Kaitlan Collins noted; Haberman countered that it would also hand Democrats fresh material for ads.

Against that backdrop, the Michigan appearance was built to do a specific job: a battleground-state rally, two Trump-endorsed candidates and a patriotic set piece heading into the anniversary. Instead, a seven-word slip carried out of the room — one critics are using to argue the vice president is careless with language on subjects that demand precision.