The newest Trump 9/11 story arrived Tuesday afternoon at the White House, where he told a gathering of first responders that two firemen picked him up off the ground and ran with him in the aftermath of the attacks.
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“Two firemen, big strong guys, and I’m not the smallest guy in the world, they grabbed me under the arm and said, ‘we gotta get out of here’ and they literally lifted me up,” he said. “This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. They were amazing.”The event was a tribute ahead of Friday’s 25th anniversary. NYPD officers and FDNY officials were in the audience. The Tunnel to Towers Foundation brought a steel beam recovered from the South Tower to the Ellipse for the occasion, 21 feet long and weighing nearly 17,000 pounds, part of a national tour the foundation is running to mark the quarter century.
What makes Tuesday notable is that this is the third version of the Trump 9/11 account he has offered in five days, and each one has gotten bigger.
On Sunday, in an interview with Fox News host Trey Gowdy, he said he was putting up a building in New York at the time, had a large crew of construction workers, and took them downtown the day after the towers fell. He said they “worked long and hard.” Reporters covering the interview pointed out that this appeared to be the first time in 25 years he had actually attached a date to the visit.
Back in 2021, on Newsmax, he told a version of the firemen story that was considerably smaller. In that telling he heard creaking from a 50 story building nearby, announced that it was going to collapse, and two firemen grabbed him along with several other people and moved everyone out of the area. He acknowledged in the same breath that the building never came down. Nobody was lifted. Nobody ran. He was one of a group being walked away from a spot.
Tuesday’s Trump 9/11 version has him alone, airborne, and carried.
The men who ran the recovery have addressed this before. Richard Alles, a former FDNY deputy chief, spent months at the site. He attended a 2019 White House ceremony where Trump signed a bill funding health care for first responders, and at that ceremony Trump told the room he had been down there too, though he stopped short of calling himself a first responder. Alles later told the New York Times, “I spent many months there myself, and I never witnessed him.”
The construction crew claim has its own paper trail problem. On September 13, 2001, Trump publicly said he had more than a hundred workers on the site with another hundred on the way. Alles has said a deployment like that would have left records behind, because every crew working the pile answered to police and fire department supervision. Reporters who have gone looking for those records over the years have not produced them, and neither has Trump.
What does exist from that week is a phone call. While the towers were still smoking, Trump called into a New Jersey television station and used part of the conversation to point out that his building at 40 Wall Street had become the tallest in lower Manhattan now that the World Trade Center was gone. That was not accurate either. 70 Pine Street is taller.
Four years later, campaigning in 2015, he told a rally crowd he had watched thousands of people in Jersey City celebrating in the street as the buildings fell. No footage of that has ever surfaced.The Trump 9/11 record, then, comes down to two categories. Documented: he was in New York, he owned buildings downtown, he visited the area in the days after, and he gave interviews near the site on September 13. Not documented: the hundred workers, the crowds cheering in Jersey City, and now two firefighters lifting a grown man off his feet and carrying him out of danger in the middle of the largest rescue operation in American history.
The timing of the remarks lands inside a separate fight. Trump will not be at Ground Zero on Friday. He is speaking at the Pentagon instead. The New York Times reported that his team had planned a New York visit and changed course once it became clear he would not be permitted to speak, since the National September 11 Memorial and Museum has barred politicians from delivering remarks at the ceremony since 2012 in order to keep the event nonpartisan.
Trump disputed that reporting and went after the reporter who wrote it, Maggie Haberman, calling her a “Fake Reporter” on social media. JD Vance will attend the New York ceremony in his place. Joe Biden will be at Ground Zero as well.
So Friday will produce two images. One is a memorial in Manhattan where the names are read aloud and no politician gets a microphone. The other is a podium in Virginia where Trump gets to speak, three days after telling a room of firefighters and police officers a story about 9/11 that the firefighters who were actually there have spent years saying does not match what they saw.
