Photo: Getty Images North America
A recent New York Post expose on the 9/11 Memorial and Museum at the site of the Twin Towers revealed that the site in running in the red, while several of its curators and directors draw exorbitant salaries. Many 9/11 families have said they would like to see the Memorial fall under the direction of the National Parks Service, which does already run the sites where several of America’s most solemn or bloody events have occurred, such as Pearl Harbor and Gettysburg. Cue President Trump- he has weighed in on the kerfuffle, saying that federal leadership would be better at managing the site. That statement has generated opinions both ways about whether Trump should have a say in the museum’s management.
With nearly a quarter century gone by since the attack, and with so many of us still alive who remember the day’s events vividly, the question touches a still-sore spot, yet seems worth raising- who should be running the Ground Zero site; specifically, how would you feel if Donald Trump has a say in that issue? Natalie Migliore asked commuters outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal for 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to see what people thought as the 24th anniversary of 9/11 draws near.
The overwhelming sentiment on 8th Avenue was no, he should stay out of it. “I think it’s crazy,” one man told Migliore. “I think a lot of people lost their lives, and I think there should be some type of respect left for them. I think he’s doing a lot of irradical (sic), selfish things that have nothing to do with us as Americans.”
Another pedestrian thought we should pay less attention to a museum and more attention to sick first-responders: “I think a lot of people don’t even realize a lot of people got sick from it. The Republicans were trying to stop them from getting health care; I remember John Stewart went on TV and made a big rant about how these people are just disrespecting the responders who helped out and then they became sick.”
Surprisingly, Migliore found several commuters, like this one, who think Trump threw the museum management morsel out there to distract people from the release of a certain DOJ file on a certain billionaire-turned-child-sex-trafficker: “It’s probably just another Epstein distraction. There’s got to be something there, right? I mean, why is he pushing to hide it, you know? The whole thing is he kind of said it, when he was running, that he was gonna release the files, and then he brought in all these conspiracy theorists who were pushing it, who made names for themselves on it. So, you know, he brought it on himself, right?”
Photo Credit: Getty Images