Vice President JD Vance quipped he was looking forward to spending time with former President Joe Biden during the commemoration service in New York City marking the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“As you guys can probably guess, I’m really looking forward to hanging out with Joe Biden,” Vance told reporters on Thursday during his second solo White House press briefing. “I’m sure that we’ll have many, many intense intellectual conversations, and, you know, it’ll be great. We’ll have a great time with Joe Biden and the other presidents.”
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Vance will be at the ground zero ceremony next Friday with all the living former presidents other than President Donald Trump, who will be at a similar service at the Pentagon.
Vance on Thursday downplayed concerns the decision for Trump to miss the ceremony was security-related amid disputed reports it was because he was not provided with the opportunity to speak.
“No, I don’t think it’s a special security concern,” Vance said, though he added he would “follow up with Secret Service just to get you an actual answer on that.”
“But that’s not what I’ve heard,” he said.
Instead, Vance contended it was a scheduling issue since presidents, vice presidents, and other high-profile members of the administration cannot be in multiple places at once.
“We’d like to be three or four places on 9/11, but you can’t have one person be in multiple locations at the exact same time and so we just decided as a team that I would go to New York for 9/11, the president would stay in D.C., of course to commemorate what happened at the Pentagon, because that was a critical part of of the tragedy of 9/11 as well,” he said. “I will say that as much as it’s tragic and it was a terrible day, I am looking forward to it because it’s such an amazing honor to be able to get to go to New York and to share in that moment.”
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Vance, who acknowledged there is a growing number of people who were not born when 9/11 occurred, recalled a previous trip to New York City for an anniversary event as “one of the most amazing experiences in my life and I encourage every American, particularly the people who are young enough to not really remember that day, just to tune in for a couple of hours and see what it meant.”
“I think that sense of commonality and common purpose that we all had on 9/11, that’s something that we should really try every single day to get back to,” he said. “If even just for a day, even if just for a few hours, I would encourage people to tune in.”
