“When we say ‘never forget,’ it is not an abstract phrase,” he said last week. “It is a deep and abiding commitment to remember the sacrifice made by the FDNY and other first responders, to look after those who are sick, and to honor them by building a city that will make them proud.”
The uniformed officers sitting behind the mayor applauded his remarks; the audience of family members in front of him, not so much.
As a candidate in 2025, Mamdani talked about being a Muslim kid growing up in the city at the time, and having an “auntie” who he said was scared to ride the subway wearing her hijab in the days after 9/11, because of the harsh Islamophobia that emerged following the attacks. During Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, opponents criticized his past tweets mourning America’s 9/11 deaths as well as “the hundreds of thousands who died in the wars that followed” as moral equivalency. The mayor could use the FDNY event as an opportunity to discuss how hatred and bigotry too often lead to tragedy, but trying to thread that very tricky needle would shift even more focus onto Mamdani.
“I think the mayor really wants to kind of honor the suffering of the people who were murdered that day, and of the families who lost those people,” Zara Rahim, a Mamdani insider, says. “There are 364 other days to have a broader political conversation.”
The fact that the 9/9 FDNY event will take place on Staten Island may be coincidental, but it’s culturally fitting. The borough has produced a wide range of New Yorkers, from Si Newhouse to the Wu-Tang Clan to Colin Jost (and, full disclosure, both of my parents). Yet Staten Island has historically and consistently been the city’s most conservative precinct. Donald Trump took Staten Island by 30 points in 2024. The borough has long been home to a large population of first responders; 274 Staten Islanders died on 9/11, including 78 members of the FDNY, nearly a quarter of the total killed at the time. World Trade Center rubble and remains were carted to Staten Island’s Fresh Kills Landfill.
A fascinating recent podcast, “The Staten Island Problem,” explored how a 1993 secession movement didn’t just help elect Rudy Giuliani as mayor, but prefigured a national emphasis on the politics of resentment and racial backlash, elements that Trump craftily exploited when he twice won the White House. “Giuliani and Trump saw that these things existed, for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons, and they knew how to stoke them. It’s not an exact match, but there’s an eerie similarity,” says Ben Naddaff-Hafrey, the podcast’s creator. “I’m really interested to see what’s going to happen at the FDNY event, because it’s going to be a sensitive moment.”
And it will take place in a highly appropriate setting. In 1993, Staten Island voted overwhelmingly to secede, but the state legislature refused to let the borough leave. Mayor Giuliani, however, thanked Staten Island for its role in his win by showering it with development money and projects—including a minor league ballpark. On 9/9, Mayor Mamdani will be standing before thousands of firefighters in the house that Rudy built.
