For years, President Donald Trump has made unfounded claims about his activities on Sept. 11, 2001 and the days to follow. On Tuesday, he added a new element to a previous debunked claim.
Speaking in front of first responder and 9/11 families in Washington D.C. during a “Steel Across America” remembrance ceremony organized by the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, Trump recounted the day of the terror attacks.
During his remarks, Trump spoke about what he was doing that day, including repeating past claims that he was able to see the damage to the World Trade Center when he “looked out my window” and that he took a “whole crew” of his employees down to Ground Zero right afterwards to help out.
He also claimed two fireman “literally lifted me up” and “started running with me” to evacuate him from a building they feared would come down.
A transcript of Trump’s remarks from the video clip above:
In the course of history, there are a few moments that divide time into really what came before, when you look at what took place that day, nobody will ever even think of such a thing being able to happen again. And we’re going to do everything in our power to make sure it doesn’t.
That was a day like no other. September 11th was one of those moments in time where you always — everybody knows exactly where they were. I know exactly where I was, I was watching, and looking, and it was a beautiful, beautiful morning. And I looked out and then all of a sudden I saw an alert on television. I looked out my window and I saw things that I never want to see again. We’re never going to see them again.
But in just over 100 minutes, 175,000 tons of steel and concrete were reduced to ruin, and 3,000 lives were extinguished, immediately extinguished. The world we knew and the nation that we loved have — had changed. I said it to myself and I looked and I said, “Well, the world has changed forever.”
So many things have changed because of that day. Yet this battered piece of steel here today on the ellipse is a reminder that America is blessed with the strength no fire can consume, no evil can conquer, and no terror can destroy. For three months after Sept. 11th, the flames raged in the rubble of Ground Zero. For nine months, rescue and recovery crews worked day and night on the site.
I want to just thank my people — 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 were — 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, and nobody’s seen anything like it, ever.
We had other buildings, the 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, uh, it never came down.
And I — 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. They — “Gotta 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. U.S. Steel, the 16,000 pound beam lifted from the wreckage of the South Tower, will forever testify to the courage and resilience and spirit of a city and a nation that saw our homeland, struck our towers, knocked down and stood back up stronger, more determined, and more united than ever before.
Numerous fact checkers over the years have noted the more than six -foot-tall Trump’s claim of being hastily evacuated by firemen and failed to find supporting evidence for it. The suggestion that two firemen picked up Trump — who is more than six feet tall — under the arms and “ran” with him is simply not plausible, even considering his lower weight when he was younger.
CNN’s Daniel Dale was one of many who swiftly jumped in to dissect the president’s claims.
“President Trump was not in the vicinity of the World Trade Center when it was hit,” wrote Dale. “He was in Trump Tower, miles away from the towers and nearby One Liberty Plaza, which is/was also known as the US Steel building.”
As numerous articles have pointed out, it is not plausible for Trump to have been able to see with the naked the damage to the Twin Towers from Trump’s building in Midtown, roughly four miles away from the WTC site. He would have been able to see the smoke plume rising but not details, nor would he have been able to witness people “jumping” from the burning towers, as he previously claimed during a campaign rally in late 2015. He also would not have been able to directly see the second plane hit, as he claimed on Sept. 11, 2019.
Screenshot via Google Maps.
Regarding Trump’s claim he was at Ground Zero with a big crew of staff, Dale noted Trump has offered various versions of this claim but there is no evidence to back it up:
In varying language, he has repeatedly claimed for years he was at Ground Zero with a large crew of his workers helping with the recovery in the days after 9/11, but people who were definitely on site have said they never saw him or a Trump-organized crew on site and that it wouldn’t make sense for them to have had access; there are pictures and videos of Trump in the neighborhood in the following days, in a clean suit, but not on the actual site.
A detailed fact check by Newsweek’s Tom Norton in 2024 dug into these claims by Trump and found that there was “no evidence that Trump helped clear rubble or helped find survivors on 9/11.”
“PolitiFact, USA Today and Poynter said they were unable to verify whether he paid workers to help or that he was there, either,” Norton added, and cited Politifact’s interview with Richard Alles, who was a battalion chief in the Fire Department of New York on 9/11, in which he said he had no knowledge of Trump being at Ground Zero or sending hundreds of workers to help:
“I was there for several months—I have no knowledge of his being down there,” Alles said, adding that “there would be a record of it.”
“Everybody worked under direct supervision of the police and fire department and the joint commander for emergency services.
“Is there a chance he was ever down there by himself and I didn’t know it? It’s possible, but I know of no one who ever witnessed him there.”
As for Trump’s claims about One Liberty Plaza, Dale again noted there was a lack of evidence to back up his claims:
There was public concern in the days following the attack that One Liberty Plaza might collapse, but the authorities repeatedly said it was structurally sound, and there’s not currently any public evidence Trump went into it amid these collapse worries (?), much less that he was rushed out by firefighters…
While campaigning in 2016, he told a version of today’s story about being whisked away from One Liberty Plaza by big firemen, but he said in 2016 that the alleged incident happened “a couple of days” after 9/11 and claimed the creaky building was “not so far from us,” instead of leaving open the impression he might’ve been a) inside it b) on 9/11 itself.
“An extra-odd aside from Trump was that One Liberty Plaza, the building from which he was supposedly whisked away by firemen, ‘still creaks’ today. It reopened in October 2001, less than two months after the attacks 25 years ago, with no structural damage,” Dale added in a follow-up tweet.
Watch the clip above via CNN.
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