President marks the twenty-fourth anniversary of September 11 by attending a Yankees game; the crowd's reaction is mixed.

The morning of September 11, 2025, the President of the United States attended the annual remembrance ceremony at the Pentagon. The ceremony, originally scheduled for the courtyard outdoors, was moved inside out of an abundance of caution following the Wednesday assassination of a high-profile activist. Speaking from a lectern inside the building, the President read a prepared text, named the 184 dead, and was, by all accounts, on script.

In the evening, the President of the United States traveled to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx to watch the New York Yankees play the Detroit Tigers. He sat in a box near the field. He chatted with the Yankees team president, Randy Levine, throughout the game. He stopped by the Yankees clubhouse before the first pitch, shook hands with the players, and spoke at length about his long acquaintance with the late George Steinbrenner.

When he was shown on the stadium jumbotron during the national anthem, the crowd’s reaction was mixed. There were cheers. There were also, audibly on the broadcast, boos. The boos were not muted. The Yankees did not request that they be muted. The Yankees, in fact, made no public comment about the in-stadium reaction.

The structural matter is a comparison. Twenty-four years earlier, on October 30, 2001, President George W. Bush threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium for Game 3 of the World Series, weeks after the attacks. The pitch went in over the plate. The crowd, which had been a city in mourning, stood and roared. The moment is preserved on tape. It is, fairly, one of the moments at which a presidency rose to a national occasion.

Thursday’s attendance was not that. The Yankees won 9-3. The President left after the seventh inning. The Tigers came back to four runs in the ninth that did not matter.

A serious country goes to the ballpark on the anniversary because the city the towers were in is a city that built itself out of the rubble around its own ballpark. A serious country, when it stands during the anthem on the jumbotron, hears the cheers and the boos, and accepts that both are the country it serves. Twenty-four years is a long time. The country has aged. The cheers have gotten thinner. The boos are louder. The flag, however, is the flag. The pitch, in 2001, was a strike.

Calmly documenting the decline.