Donald Trump said on Tuesday that two firefighters grabbed him under the arm and carried him away from Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks. Speaking at the Ellipse near the White House, he said the men thought a nearby steel structure was about to come down on them.
Trump made the claim while marking the upcoming 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, with a piece of structural steel from the fallen World Trade Center towers on display behind him. He said the steel was proof that America has a strength no fire can consume, no evil can conquer and no terror can destroy.
He described the structure as the U.S. Steel Building and said it was “creaking” badly enough that he believed it might fall. In his account, the firefighters pulled him up, started running with him and ignored his insistence that he could run on his own. It was not the first time he has told the story. At a January 2016 campaign stop in New Hampshire, he said he heard a screech and that two “massive” firemen grabbed him as people feared the building was coming down.
The problem is that the story has never lined up cleanly with the people who were actually there. First responders who were at the World Trade Center site have said they never saw Trump on the ground, even as he has repeatedly claimed he was near the site in the immediate aftermath of the attacks and has boasted about sending crews from one of his construction projects to help recovery efforts.
That leaves his latest retelling as more than another campaign-era flourish. Trump was not unveiling new evidence, and he did not offer any to settle the question. He repeated a memory that remains central to how he has described that day, but the basic fact behind it — whether he was there as he has long said — is still unproven in the record he invoked on Tuesday.
