> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://capital-to-capitol.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Today is September 11, 2026. The 25th anniversary is being observed at Ground Zero, the Pentagon, and Shanksville. The workers who cleaned up after the attacks (many of them undocumented) are now hiding from ICE. - URL: https://capital-to-capitol.ghost.io/today-is-september-11-2026-the-25th-anniversary-is-being-observed-at-ground-zero-the-pentagon-and-shanksville-the-workers-who-cleaned-up-after-the-attacks-many-of-them-undocumented-are/ - Published: 2026-09-11T17:47:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-17T02:05:28.000Z - Description: Trump led the GOP convention in a pledge to "cheat like hell." Houthis seized the entire Red Sea coastline. Oil hit $110. Diesel $6.06 nationally for the first time. The CDC removed measles deaths from its website. The workers who cleaned up Ground Zero are hiding from ICE. Friday closed the week. - Author: Saanjali Ganesh - Tags: Elections, Energy Policy, Public Health, Trade Policy, International, Housing Today is September 11, 2026\. The ceremonies are at Ground Zero, the Pentagon, and Shanksville. That is not the only thing happening. Here is Friday. --- **At the Republican convention last night, Trump led the crowd in a pledge to "cheat like hell" to win the midterms. He told them if they failed to vote, they would go to hell. He also led them in a personal loyalty oath to himself.** [After telling attendees at the Republican midterm convention Thursday night that "we want honesty in our elections," President Trump led thousands of Republicans in a pledge to "cheat like hell" and go out and vote in the midterm elections](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-trump-leads-rnc-in-pledge-to-cheat-like-hell-in-november-elections). [He asked attendees to raise their right hands and repeat a pledge to vote on November 3rd, even if they were not registered, and to cheat like hell. He told those who failed to vote that they would "go to hell." He led the crowd in a personal loyalty oath to himself, describing himself as "the greatest president in the history of the United States"](https://www.democracynow.org/2026/9/11/headlines). Trump has previously called for "long term prison sentences" for election cheaters and made repeated claims about widespread voter fraud in 2020\. He framed the cheat like hell line as a joke about what Democrats do. The framing, that cheating is acceptable because the other side does it, produced immediate backlash. Wisconsin Congressman Mark Pocan said: "So now it's $5,000 bribes that Trump will never deliver to attempt to make voters forget what they are paying for gas and food." The convention was designed to help Republican candidates in competitive House and Senate races. Its defining viral moment is the president leading thousands of people in a chant to commit voting crimes between statements about election integrity. An attendee at the convention also called for a Democratic Senate candidate to be shot, remarks that drew no official condemnation from the stage. The midterms are 61 days away. --- **The Houthis just seized Yemen's entire Red Sea coastline and the island sitting inside the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Yesterday they had a port 50 miles from the strait. Today they have the strait itself.** [The Houthi movement seized control of Yemen's entire Red Sea coastline and the strategic island of Perim, a small island sitting directly at the southern entrance to the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the narrow maritime passage through which roughly 12% of global maritime trade flows between Asia and Europe via the Suez Canal](https://havanatimes.org/news/international-news-briefs-for-friday-september-11-2026/). Saudi forces carried out airstrikes on the port city of Mokha in response but Houthi fighters consolidated their control. Yesterday's brief covered the Houthi seizure of Mokha, described as a position less than 50 miles from the Bab al-Mandab. Today the Houthis have taken the entire Yemeni Red Sea coastline and Perim island, which does not sit near the strait but within it. The strait is roughly 18 miles wide at its narrowest point. Perim sits in the middle. The Houthis have said they will not disrupt international shipping but have reiterated threats against Saudi Arabian vessels. The oil market read the Perim seizure as a direct threat to global energy supply and responded accordingly. Yesterday the brief closed with oil at $110\. The price of that island is being paid at every gas station and truck stop in the country right now. --- **Oil hit $110 a barrel. Diesel hit $6.06 a gallon nationally for the first time in history. A drone also struck Qatar's main LNG production facility.** [Oil prices surged toward $110 a barrel as Houthi fighters seized an island inside the Bab al-Mandab Strait and more ships were struck near the Strait of Hormuz](https://havanatimes.org/news/international-news-briefs-for-friday-september-11-2026/). [Diesel prices in the United States soared past $6 a gallon for the first time in history, reaching a national average of $6.06, up from $5.85 last week and nearly $3.71 this time last year, according to AAA](https://www.upi.com/Top%5FNews/US/2026/09/11/diesel-prices-hit-record-high/2821789138922). A drone strike also damaged Qatar's liquefied natural gas production, threatening supplies from the world's largest LNG exporter. Diesel powers trucks, freight trains, ships, and farm equipment. It is the direct input cost of moving everything in the physical economy. When diesel hits $6.06, the price increase does not stop at the pump. It passes through every link in the supply chain and arrives in the price of everything transported through those links, which is effectively everything. This week: oil was $100 on Monday. Oil is $110 on Friday. A $10 increase in the price of a barrel of oil in five days, driven by Houthi seizure of a Red Sea island, the Iran war, damage to Qatar's LNG production, and Trump saying Friday he is not looking for a deal with Iran. The Fed meets in two weeks. There is no soft landing available into a week that moved like this. --- **RFK Jr. questioned the two Pennsylvania measles deaths. The CDC removed them from its website. Former CDC officials are calling it a red flag going into flu season.** [The worst measles resurgence in the United States in decades keeps growing. Many public health experts are now deeply worried about the reliability of health data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the unprecedented step of questioning two Pennsylvania measles deaths, and the CDC subsequently removed them from its website](https://www.npr.org/2026/09/11/nx-s1-5950002/as-diseases-loom-cdcs-response-to-measles-deaths-stirs-fears-about-agencys-reliability). ["Red flag. Red alert," said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who resigned as director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases to protest political interference. "When they raise doubt on the determination that a state may have made around a death, that is highly problematic. This is dangerous."](https://www.npr.org/2026/09/11/nx-s1-5950002/as-diseases-loom-cdcs-response-to-measles-deaths-stirs-fears-about-agencys-reliability) Neither the CDC nor HHS responded to NPR's repeated requests for comment. When someone dies from measles, the state makes the official determination and reports it to the CDC, which alerts the country. The CDC almost always defers to the state. RFK Jr. publicly disputed the state's determination. The CDC removed the deaths from its official count. The consequence of that removal is not administrative — it is informational. Every doctor, parent, school district, and state health department that relies on CDC data now has a CDC that has demonstrated its count is subject to revision under political pressure. Flu season is imminent. COVID continues circulating. RSV comes every winter. Dr. Georges Benjamin of the American Public Health Association said: "More people will get sick and more people will die because they won't know what to do. They won't know who to trust. And that is the problem here." --- **The US-Canada trade war is destroying the auto parts supply chain. A single transmission can cross the border eight times before it becomes a car. The tariffs hit it each time.** [For decades the US and Canadian auto supply chains have been tightly woven together, with components crossing the border multiple times at different stages of production before a finished vehicle is assembled. The trade war is threatening to unravel that system, creating significant headaches for auto parts makers on both sides of the border](https://npr.org/sections/world/). Michigan swing voters are bracing for higher prices. Harley-Davidson, whose motorcycles are subject to Canadian retaliatory tariffs, is facing significant losses in its Canadian market. The integrated North American auto manufacturing system was built over decades under the assumption that the border was irrelevant to manufacturing. A 50% US tariff on Canadian goods combined with Canadian retaliatory tariffs does not just raise the price of a finished car. It raises the cost of every single border crossing at every stage of production, multiplied by however many times a component crosses the border before it becomes a vehicle. Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana, the states where the consequence lands most directly on manufacturing workers and communities, are among the states that will decide control of the House and Senate in November. The voters absorbing the trade war's industrial cost are being asked to evaluate it in the same election the administration wants to win. --- **A Hong Kong court sentenced three Tiananmen vigil organizers to 5-7 years in prison. Hong Kong used to hold the largest annual Tiananmen commemoration outside mainland China.** [A Hong Kong court sentenced three organizers of the city's annual Tiananmen Square vigil to approximately five to seven years in prison in a case widely seen as a barometer of Hong Kong's eroding freedoms as Beijing clamps down on dissent](https://npr.org/sections/world/). For more than 30 years, Hong Kong held the world's largest annual candlelight vigil on June 4 to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when Chinese military forces killed hundreds or thousands of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing. It was one of the only places in China where the massacre could be publicly commemorated. The vigil drew tens of thousands of people annually. After the 2020 National Security Law imposed on Hong Kong by Beijing, the vigil was banned, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, the organization that ran it for three decades, was disbanded under coercion, and its leaders were arrested. The sentencing of three of those leaders to 5-7 years today is the formal legal conclusion of a process that began when Beijing decided that the annual act of remembering Tiananmen was a threat to national security. The vigil is gone. The people who kept it alive for three decades are in prison. The massacre is still not acknowledged by the Chinese government. All of those things are true on the same Friday. --- **The workers who cleaned up Ground Zero after September 11 are now hiding from ICE. Today is the 25th anniversary.** [After the September 11 attacks, thousands of rescue and cleanup workers went to work at Ground Zero. They were exposed to toxic debris and experienced profound psychological trauma. Today, many of those workers say they live in fear of deportation](https://www.npr.org/sections/news/). Today the country observed 25 years since the attacks. A new seventh moment of silence was added to the Ground Zero ceremony this year, acknowledging the thousands who have since died from illnesses caused by what they breathed. More than 57,000 people are enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program, diagnosed with cancers and other conditions from the cleanup. Among the people who did that cleanup, risking their lives and their health in the months after the towers fell, were undocumented immigrants. They were there. They breathed the air. They got sick. And on the 25th anniversary of the day they showed up, they are afraid to show up anywhere ICE might be looking. The country added a seventh moment of silence for those who died from cleaning up after the attacks. Some of the people who cleaned up are afraid to attend the ceremony. Both of those things are true on the same day. --- **A new type of loan is sweeping the country and creating a foreclosure crisis. Wall Street has funneled billions into it.** [There is a new type of loan sweeping through the country, advertised as a super quick and super easy way to get a mortgage to buy a home. In recent years Wall Street has been funneling billions of dollars into these loans, and experts are warning they are creating the conditions for a new foreclosure crisis](https://www.npr.org/sections/news/). The details of the specific loan product and its structural risks were the subject of NPR's Planet Money reporting today. The broad pattern is familiar from the 2008 financial crisis: a new mortgage product that lowers barriers to entry, attracts Wall Street capital because of its yield, and passes risk to borrowers who may not fully understand the terms. The housing market this brief covered throughout August was already stressed by high mortgage rates driven by the Iran war, housing starts at their lowest since the financial crisis, and $110 oil arriving into an economy already absorbing Canada tariffs. A new high-risk loan product sweeping the country in that environment is the 2026 version of a pattern the country experienced before. The details of this specific product, its terms, its failure rate, and its distribution will become clearer as the foreclosure data follows. The NPR reporting is the first public warning. Those tend to arrive before the crisis, not after it. --- **The thread underneath Friday and the week** Trump led the GOP convention in a pledge to cheat like hell, led a personal loyalty oath to himself as the greatest president in history, told the crowd they would go to hell if they failed to vote, and an attendee called for a Democratic Senate candidate to be shot, the convention's closing night producing every image it was designed to avoid. The Houthis seized Yemen's entire Red Sea coastline and Perim island, a position inside the Bab al-Mandab Strait rather than near it, the chokepoint now under physical Houthi control for the first time. Oil hit $110 and diesel hit $6.06 nationally for the first time in history, driven by two maritime chokepoints under simultaneous threat, damage to Qatar's LNG production, and a president who said he is not looking for a deal. The CDC removed two Pennsylvania measles deaths from its website after RFK Jr. questioned the state's determination, former CDC officials saying it is dangerous and a red flag as flu season approaches and the agency's credibility with state health departments deteriorates. The US-Canada trade war is destroying the auto parts supply chain that crosses the border multiple times before becoming a finished vehicle, with the industrial consequence landing in the swing states deciding Congress in November. A Hong Kong court sentenced three Tiananmen vigil organizers to 5-7 years in prison, the formal legal conclusion of Beijing's decision that remembering a massacre is a national security threat. The workers who cleaned up Ground Zero after the September 11 attacks are now hiding from ICE on the 25th anniversary of the day they showed up. A new high-risk loan type backed by Wall Street billions is sweeping the country and creating the conditions for a foreclosure crisis. Maryland officials demanded ICE accountability after agents beat protesters and threatened residents during a 40-hour operation in Frederick. Trump appeared to fall asleep during the Pentagon ceremony. A new seventh moment of silence was added to the Ground Zero ceremony for those who have since died from 9/11-related illness. Student loan transition glitches are affecting millions of federal borrowers. Seven sections, 61 days until the midterms. The week is closed. See you Monday. **What to watch this weekend:** Watch the oil and diesel prices Monday morning, because $110 oil and $6 diesel arriving into a week where the Fed meets and the Canada trade war is escalating is the economic picture that dominates every conversation. Watch whether any Republican candidate formally distances from the "cheat like hell" moment, because the video has gone viral and the political calculus in competitive districts is specific. Watch whether the CDC issues any response to the NPR reporting about removing the measles deaths, because its continued silence is itself an answer about how the agency functions right now. And watch whether the Houthi control of Perim island produces any US naval response, because a physical position inside the Bab al-Mandab is a different kind of threat than missiles fired from the mainland. See you Monday. --- *Capital to Capitol publishes every evening, five days a week. 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