As of Monday, President Joe Biden is flying back from the Group of 20 summit in India, and he’s stopping in Alaska to commemorate the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Biden, a Democrat, will be the first president to observe Sept. 11 far away from New York City or Washington, D.C. — the cities attacked by the radical Islamic terrorists 22 years ago.
“It may have been 22 years, but New Yorkers remember,” one columnist wrote in the New York Post. “Yes, Biden was in India this weekend for the G20 conference. But he couldn’t arrange his schedule to make it back for a 9/11 ceremony, instead doing a flyby on the remotest part of US soil?”
New Jersey’s Monmouth County was home to some 9/11 victims, and Monmouth made Sept. 11 a holiday for county employees this year, allowing them to attend commemorations.
Instead of sending the president himself, the White House is sending other representatives to do the president’s bidding at the three crash sites.
Vice President Kamala Harris joined the ceremony on the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum at New York’s ground zero. The event featured victims’ relatives for an hourslong reading of the names of the dead.
Closer to Washington, First Lady Jill Biden laid a wreath at the 9/11 memorial at the Pentagon in Virginia. She tested negative for COVID-19 on Thursday, after three days of testing positive.
In Pennsylvania, where one of the hijacked jets crashed after heroic passengers fought back, a remembrance and wreath-laying is scheduled at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Stoystown operated by the National Park Service. Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, is expected to attend the ceremony.
Meanwhile, the president himself will be 3,400 miles away from the Big Apple for political reasons.
The Biden administration has long focused on Alaska, given Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s role as a swing vote for Cabinet nominations. Since 2021, the administration has sent “nearly a dozen” high-ranking officials to Alaska, according to a Monday report from Politico. Most recently, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg ventured to the state last month.
“Alaska, while beautiful in the summer, is not exactly close to Washington D.C. But few senators are as critical to the Biden agenda as Murkowski,” Politico reported. “Her influence in the tightly controlled Senate has made her a magnet for top White House staff… Key Cabinet officials have been visiting Alaska to understand its issues — and to woo Murkowski.”
Just Thursday, Murkowski voted to confirm a Biden nominee to the National Labor Relations Board. She became one of only two Senate Republicans to do so, along with fellow Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan.
The same day, Biden angered some Alaskans by canceling the seven remaining oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Wednesday, overturning several first-of-their-kind sales held in the Trump administration’s waning days.
Alaska’s Republican governor condemned Biden’s moves and threatened to sue. One Democratic lawmaker, Rep. Mary Peltola, said the decision could hurt Indigenous communities in an isolated region where oil development is an important economic driver.
Murkowski told the magazine that she had known about Biden’s plan in advance.
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article.