Trump, the 9/11 South Tower Steel and the Man in the Red Bandana: The Story Behind My “We Will Never Forget” Cartoon
By Maria Grasmick | September 8, 2026
Trump 9/11 cartoon
On September 8, 2026, President Donald Trump participated in the Steel Across America commemoration on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., standing beside a massive steel beam recovered from the wreckage of the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
The 21-foot beam has traveled more than 10,500 miles across the United States with the Tunnel to Towers Foundation as the country approaches the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The White House described it as a physical reminder of the courage and sacrifice associated with 9/11.
Watching the event and then reading Trump’s remarks gave me the idea for my latest political cartoon:
WE WILL NEVER FORGET.
Trump, WTC Steel and the Red Bandana
One of the central figures remembered at the ceremony was Welles Remy Crowther, the 24-year-old equities trader who became known as the “Man in the Red Bandana.”
Crowther helped people escape the South Tower on September 11, repeatedly returning to assist others. He died in the collapse.
At the Ellipse ceremony, Trump posthumously awarded Crowther the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which was accepted by members of Crowther’s family.
For an artist, Crowther leaves behind an extraordinarily simple and powerful visual symbol:
the red bandana.
That became the second element of my cartoon.
The first was the steel.
Why I Turned the South Tower Steel Upright on Trump 9/11 cartoon
The actual Steel Across America artifact is displayed horizontally. In my cartoon, however, I deliberately turned the steel vertical.
That choice came from something I noticed while studying Trump’s speech.
The remarks repeatedly returned to images of vertical movement.
The towers were knocked down.
The country stood back up.
Firefighters went up the stairs.
Crowther repeatedly traveled up and down through the South Tower while helping people escape.
Trump spoke of America refusing to be kept down.
Near the end, he imagined Welles as being above those gathered at the Ellipse, “looking down.”
This doesn’t establish a hidden code in the speech. It is also perfectly natural language for a remembrance involving skyscrapers, stairways, collapse and rescue.
But to the eye of a cartoonist, the repetition suggested an image.
If the language was vertical, the steel should become vertical too. For my Trump 9/11 cartoon
Trump described the recovered beam as representing a nation whose towers had been knocked down but which had stood again. He concluded the passage:
“America will fight, America will endure, and America will prevail.”
That became the conceptual architecture of my drawing.
The Red Bandana Becomes a Liberty Cap
I placed Welles Crowther’s red bandana at the top of the upright World Trade Center steel.
Then I noticed something unexpected.
The silhouette reminded me of historical images of the liberty pole and liberty cap.
Liberty poles and caps appeared in the revolutionary iconography of the eighteenth century. The red Phrygian cap would become particularly famous as an emblem of the French Revolution, although liberty-cap imagery also has an earlier history in the American revolutionary tradition.
I hadn’t set out to reproduce that symbol.
It emerged from the composition.
The battered steel became the pole.
The red bandana occupied the place of the cap.
And suddenly a contemporary 9/11 image seemed to contain the distant visual vocabulary of the revolutionary age.
Steel, Fire, Fall and Ascent
Another passage from Trump’s September 8 remarks became important to the cartoon.
Speaking about the recovered South Tower steel, Trump called it a reminder of a strength that “no fire can consume, no evil can conquer, and no terror can destroy.”
The visual vocabulary of the drawing therefore became remarkably simple:
STEEL → FIRE → FALL → RED → RISE → REMEMBER
Steel is architectural.
The bandana is human.
One weighs thousands of pounds.
The other is a piece of cloth.
Yet both survived as symbols of the same morning.
The Man in the Red Bandana
The red bandana is especially important because it isn’t an invented political symbol.
It belonged to a real person.
Survivors recalled an unidentified rescuer whose face was partially covered by a red bandana. Crowther was later identified as that man. His actions became one of the best-known individual stories of heroism from inside the World Trade Center.
Trump recounted Crowther’s story during the ceremony before awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
That history changed how I wanted to handle the red in my cartoon.
It couldn’t merely be decoration.
It had to sit at the highest point.
Drawing a 9/11 Political Cartoon Without Recreating a Photograph
My finished cartoon is intentionally allegorical.
Trump did not hold the South Tower beam vertically during the ceremony. The real artifact was displayed horizontally.
I changed its orientation deliberately. VERTICAL Vocabulary he used.
Likewise, the red bandana at its summit is my artistic construction.
The little plaque on the steel, WTC / SOUTH TOWER / 9/11 , exists to tell the viewer immediately what the battered object represents.
The resulting image isn’t intended as a documentary reconstruction of the Ellipse ceremony.
It is an editorial cartoon created from its symbols.
That distinction matters to me.
Political cartoons can rearrange physical reality in order to reveal an idea, but the historical facts underneath the metaphor should remain identifiable.
“We Will Never Forget”
Ultimately I decided against filling the background with crowds, flags or Washington architecture.
The image needed silence.
A man.
A piece of steel.
A red bandana.
An open hand.
And four words:
WE WILL NEVER FORGET.
The Steel Across America beam came from a structure destroyed on September 11, 2001. Welles Crowther went into that structure and helped strangers escape. Twenty-five years later, the steel and the red bandana have become two radically different kinds of historical artifact.
One is monumental.
The other is intimate.
In my cartoon, I brought them together.
And I stood the steel back up.
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Drawn by Maria Grasmick
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