New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani says he will attend the 25th-anniversary ceremony for the September 11 attacks, but he couldn't be bothered to show up for the memorial honoring victims of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing just months earlier, and families of the dead want him to stay away.
On February 26, the 33rd annual memorial service for the six people killed and more than 1,000 injured in the 1993 bombing took place at the September 11 Memorial plaza in Lower Manhattan. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, FDNY First Deputy Commissioner Dan Flynn, and City Council Speaker Julie Menin all attended. Mamdani did not. He sent Deputy Mayor of Operations Julia Kerson in his place and flew to Washington, D.C., for a private meeting with President Donald Trump to pitch a 12,000-unit affordable housing project at a railyard in Queens, a proposal seeking more than $21 billion in federal funds.
Mamdani later called the meeting "productive." His office did not return messages seeking comment on why he skipped the memorial. The White House has not commented on the meeting either.
Andrew Colabella, a Republican legislator from Westport, Connecticut, lost his cousin John DiGiovanni in the 1993 attack. DiGiovanni was 41 years old. Colabella did not hold back about the mayor's absence, telling the New York Post that Mamdani skipped the ceremony because it drew little media attention, and because he feared being booed.
"He blew us off and passed on it because he does not give a s, t. The only thing he cares about is his ego and his so-called political future."
Colabella pointed to a pattern. In April, Mamdani made his way to Ground Zero, not for the families, but to greet King Charles III, with plenty of cameras rolling. The contrast tells you where the mayor's priorities sit: he shows up when the world is watching and disappears when only grieving families are there.
Edward Smith, whose wife Monica Rodriguez Smith was killed in the 1993 bombing, offered a blunter assessment. Monica was 35 years old and seven months pregnant when terrorists detonated a bomb in the underground parking garage beneath the Twin Towers. Smith, a native New Yorker now living in Scottsdale, Arizona, said Mamdani did the families a favor by staying away.
"It is best he didn't show up, but it's even crazier that New York would elect him mayor in the first place."
Mamdani has faced growing public hostility during his time in office. He was booed off the stage at an NYPD event on Staten Island after less than a minute, a scene that illustrated how thin his support runs among the city's first responders and working-class residents.
Despite skipping the February memorial, Mamdani has stated he plans to attend the 25th-anniversary ceremony for the September 11 attacks at Ground Zero. Families of the nearly 3,000 people killed that day are pushing back hard. A Change.org petition demanding the mayor stay away has gathered more than 80,000 signatures.
Colabella said he is among those who signed. Smith said he has not, not because he wants the mayor there, but because he believes the petition "empowers" Mamdani. Smith said he would rather see people who oppose the mayor's presence "boo him or turn their backs on him."
The question of whether Mamdani belongs at Ground Zero on September 11 is not merely ceremonial. It touches something deeper: whether the man leading New York City takes seriously the attacks that defined it.
Colabella cited what he described as Mamdani's longtime association with figures who have defended or minimized Islamist terrorism. He pointed to the mayor's connection with left-wing social media influencer Hasan Piker, who once said "America deserved" the September 11 attacks. He also noted that Mamdani was photographed, described as "grinning ear-to-ear", with a Brooklyn imam identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
That photograph surfaced last year. Mamdani's office has not addressed it publicly, and his representatives did not respond to the Post's inquiries about the February memorial or the upcoming September ceremony.
Former mayors Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, and Eric Adams all attended at least some of the annual 1993 bombing memorial ceremonies in person, or sent a deputy when they could not be there. The ceremony is not a major media event. It does not draw wall-to-wall cable coverage. But every prior mayor understood that showing up for the families of terror victims is part of the job, the non-negotiable, no-cameras-required part.
Mamdani chose otherwise. He flew to Washington to ask for $21 billion. The families got Julia Kerson.
The mayor's pattern of choosing spectacle over substance has shown up elsewhere in his administration. He has abandoned key campaign pledges in budget negotiations and presided over policy failures that have left New Yorkers paying the price, including a heat-wave power crisis in the Bronx that exposed the limits of his regulatory approach.
On February 26, 1993, radical Islamic terrorists murdered six people and wounded more than a thousand in the first major attack on the World Trade Center. Monica Rodriguez Smith never met her child. John DiGiovanni never came home. Every year since, New York has paused to remember them, quietly, without fanfare, at the plaza built over the ground where they died.
This year, the mayor of New York City had somewhere more important to be. And now he wants to stand at that same plaza on September 11, in front of the cameras, and act as though he belongs there.
More than 80,000 Americans have already given their answer. A mayor who skips the memorial nobody is watching has no business headlining the one everybody is.