This week is the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Trump is marking the occasion by describing his role in heroic terms, claiming he personally went to Ground Zero to aid recovery efforts. On September 6, Trump made the following remarks on Fox News:
And I went down. I was building a building in New York, and I had a lot of construction workers. And I went down there very shortly thereafter the following day, you couldn’t go down the same day, but like the following day, very, very quickly afterwards and we worked long and hard.
Trump relayed a similar story at a White House event on Tuesday:
I was building a big building in New York and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened, and they had no hesitation. Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest. It was — it was raw. Nobody’s seen anything like it ever.
Although some details change, Trump has made similar claims in interviews for decades, claiming to have sent 100 or more construction workers to Ground Zero. Trump has claimed he “helped“ clear rubble and “spent a lot of time down there.”
There is no evidence any of this is true.
Two Trump-branded buildings were under development in New York at the time — Trump World Tower and Trump Place at Riverside South. But neither Trump nor the Trump Organization employed “a lot of construction workers.” Rather, the construction manager of both developments was Bovis Lend Lease. So any construction workers were employees of Bovis Lend Lease or their subcontractors, not Trump. Journalist Tim O’Brien, who wrote a biography of Trump, noted that in 2001, the Trump Organization as a whole employed around a dozen people. Trump has never identified an employee who worked on emergency response at Ground Zero.
Richard Alles, was a battalion chief of the New York Fire Department in 2001, and supervised “search and rescue units for the entire first two weeks of the operation.” After that, Alles worked at Ground Zero in various capacities for months. “I was in a supervisory role with the fire department at the time,” Alles told PolitiFact in 2019. “I was there for several months — I have no knowledge of his being down there.”
Further, Alles said, if Trump had sent 100 construction workers to Ground Zero, “there would be a record of it” because “[e]verybody worked under direct supervision of the police and fire department and the joint commander for emergency services.” In 2019, the New York Times reported that “there is no documented evidence of [Trump] marshaling his resources to aid in the relief effort.”
“They lifted me up and they started running with me.”
On Tuesday, Trump also offered a new version of a story involving him being physically carried away from danger by firemen:
United States Steel Building was creaking. Really creaking. And we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks, but it never came down.
And I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us. And two firemen, big strong guys — and I’m not the smallest guy in the world — they grabbed me under the arm, said, ‘Got to get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down.
On September 12 and 13, there were two evacuations of the area around around One Liberty Plaza — the former U.S. Steel Building. Authorities believed at one point the building sustained structural damage and Trump gave a couple of interviews in the general vicinity on September 13.
But Trump appeared to first tell the story of getting forcibly evacuated by firefighters 15 years later during a 2016 campaign appearance in New Hampshire. In that version of the story, he runs under his own power rather than being carried. An excerpt from the New Hampshire Sunday News on January 17, 2016:
Trump said that in the following days he went to the area where two towers fell and spoke with firefighters. Suddenly, they all heard an eerie sound -- and believed another one of the buildings could collapse.
“They grabbed me,” Trump said of the quick exit from the scene. “I never knew I could run that fast.”
Trump gave a similar account to Newsmax on September 7, 2021. It is not the only 9/11-related story he appears to have embellished.
In 2015, Trump claimed he was looking out a “window in my apartment” and “watched as people jumped“ from the World Trade Center. This would have been impossible, since his apartment is in midtown, about four miles away.
At a 2015 campaign rally, Trump also claimed that, on 9/11, “I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.” Pressed for more information by ABC News, Trump said he was watching TV and saw “people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down.” While there were a number of urban myths about Muslim populations in New Jersey cheering the attack, there is no evidence that it happened — and it was certainly not broadcast on television.
The Trump is a pathological liar comes as no surprise to anyone in this world. What does astound me is that his narrative is considered “news”. The media has blood on their hands in “retweeting or reporting” these lies. That’s my beef. They violate their purpose and their credibility in perpetuating these lies.
Trump has been spewing versions of this lie for 25 years and no one has ever been brave enough to call him out to his face. Frankly any first responder who worked the pile, any family member, anyone sickened by the dust cloud, etc. has every right to walk up to him and slap him silly. At the very least, the media needs to stop giving him airtime or column inches for this shit.