Photos and video show exactly where and when Trump visited Ground Zero after 9/11
At a White House event memorializing victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President Donald Trump said he went to Lower Manhattan “right after this happened,” and had “two firemen, big strong guys … literally lifted me up” and were “running with me,” because they feared the building they were in “was coming down.”
Here’s a transcript of Trump’s remarks:
“I took a lot of my — 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 raw, nobody’s seen anything like it, ever. We had other buildings the United States Steel building was [moves hand] 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 the, 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 arms, said, ‘Gotta get out 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 and I said ‘Fellas I can run myself.’ But they were amazing but they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down, U.S. Steel.”
Coverage of Trump’s unverified story ranged from The New York Times saying it was “disputed” and had “no evidence,” to New York Magazine describing it as a “weird lie,” to the New York Post making no reference to it in its main story about Tuesday’s event, and publishing an uncritical video clip of the remarks.
Later, White House spokesman Davis Ingle told CNN that asking for confirmation of the unverified story was an “attack,” and “disgraceful.” Hours after that, Trump said on social media that he was there at Ground Zero but “obviously not on the same day as the collapse.”
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Visual evidence of where Trump was around the time of the attacks
In his social media post acknowledging he was not at Ground Zero on the day of the attack, Trump included a video of himself being interviewed in that area by a television reporter. He is wearing a dark suit, white shirt and striped red tie. The clip is undated.
The internet archiving website, Archive.org, has a specific collection of news videos from around the world on Sept. 11, 2001 and the days afterward.
In that trove, you can find Trump, wearing the same outfit, being interviewed by an NBC correspondent. According to the archive the video originally aired at 3:52 p.m. on Sept. 13, 2001.
In it, NBC correspondent Monica Novotny says,
“Now just a few moments ago Donald Trump passed through here, so we had a minute to talk with him. Let’s roll that tape, you can see what he had to say.”
You can find the full version of the three-minute interview on YouTube.
In it, Trump talks about the instability of nearby buildings and how that threatened the safety of rescue workers. Trump does not say or imply he was among those in danger. He thanks rescue workers for looking for survivors, but does not thank them for rescuing him.
Additional info is available from wire services like Getty and The Associated Press.
Credit: David Butow/Corbis via Getty Images.
Getty has at least four images of Trump near Ground Zero in the wake of the attacks. In them, he is wearing a blue suit, white shirt and dotted red tie, and the images are dated Sept. 18, 2001.
Two captions read Trump “speaks outside the New York Stock Exchange. A week after a terrorist attack…” and are credited to Todd Maisel/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images. Another reads, “Donald Trump visits the Wall Street and New York Stock Exchange area,” and is labeled, “Terrorist attack on World Trade Center – Week 2.”
A fourth image of Trump that day has the following caption: “Donald Trump arrives a [sic] the Trump Boilding [sic] in Wall Street. He said he was buying on the market today., one week after the attack and destruction of the World Trade Center.”
A search of Associated Press photos for “Donald Trump” and “2001” returns 8 images from that year. Trump appears in none of them, and is mentioned in the caption as an aside.
One image of New York Gov. George Pataki, NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Hillary Clinton, dated Sept. 12, says in its caption: “While stumping for Donald Trump in Ocala, Fla., on Oct. 12, 2016, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani accused Hillary Clinton of falsely claiming to have been in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.” That image was uploaded on Sept. 8, 2021.
That same image was reposted in Aug. 2023 with a new caption that reads, in part, “Giuliani, once warmly regarded as ‘America’s Mayor’ in the wake of the 9/11 attacks … has seen his reputation tumble and his liberty threatened in defense of Donald Trump’s bogus election fraud claims.”
A third image of the rubble at Ground Zero, dated Sept. 13, 2001, reads in part, “Twenty years on, the skepticism and suspicion first revealed by 9/11 conspiracy theories has metastasized, spread by the internet and nurtured by pundits and politicians like Donald Trump.”
A fourth image of construction workers overlooking the rubble, dated Sept. 16, 2001, notes that President Trump signed legislation in July 2019 providing money for Sept. 11 victims.