More than 110,000 people signed a petition asking New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani not to attend the 25th anniversary ceremony at Ground Zero on September 11. He showed up anyway. And then he and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were photographed laughing together while the names of nearly 3,000 dead Americans were being read aloud.
One morning. They had to hold it together for one morning.
The footage shows Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez chatting and smiling during the ceremony's most solemn moment — the reading of victims' names. Families who lost mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters on September 11, 2001, were weeping yards away. The two Democrats were networking.
Watch it for yourself
President Trump didn't mince it. "I think it's terrible," Trump said. "It's not a place to be laughing, especially in that case. The fact that they were laughing together at a very important part of the ceremony was inappropriate."
Rep. Wesley Hunt, a Republican from Texas, put it plainly: "There is a time and a place for politics. This isn't it. Ground Zero is sacred ground."
New York City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov went further. "After thousands of families of victims of terror beg Mamdani not to show up, he stands there and laughs while families weep," she said. Meghan McCain summed it up with what most Americans were already thinking, asking "Why the f--- are these two laughing?"
A former member of Rudy Giuliani's entourage, Michael Ragusa, claimed the videos were misleading, saying "The camera just caught her greeting him hello." So the defense is: she was saying hi. At a mass funeral. While the names of the dead were being read. With a smile wide enough to catch on camera from across the plaza. That's the best they've got — a greeting so warm and jovial it was indistinguishable from two people sharing a joke at brunch.
Mamdani was already a controversial presence at Ground Zero. The petition opposing his attendance gathered six figures worth of signatures from New Yorkers who remembered his record on counterterrorism issues and didn't want the ceremony turned into a photo op. He came anyway, which was his right. But the implicit promise of showing up to a memorial is that you'll actually memorialize something. Not that you'll use the forty-five seconds between name readings to catch up with a colleague.
The 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The towers falling in 2001. Nearly 3,000 lives erased in a single morning. Families who've carried that weight for a quarter century showed up to honor their dead Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez showed up too.
They just forgot what for.
