Donald Trump used a White House ceremony on Tuesday to make a new claim about September 11, saying firefighters carried him out of lower Manhattan because One Liberty Plaza was feared to be in danger of collapse. It was the latest in a string of remarks he has made over the years about the attacks that have been challenged as false or unsupported.
The timing mattered because the White House event was held as the 25th anniversary of the attacks nears, and Trump has repeatedly returned to the subject in public. The new remark was not an isolated slip into old history; it landed in the middle of a commemorative setting, where every word about the day carries extra weight and gets measured against the record.
That record is uneven. Trump said shortly after the attacks that 40 Wall Street was now the tallest building in downtown Manhattan, later arguing that it had been the second-tallest building there before the World Trade Center rose. But 70 Pine Street held that distinction, not 40 Wall Street. He also said in 2016 that he helped a little bit in clearing the rubble from the World Trade Center collapse, and told a German broadcaster soon after the attack that “we’ll have a couple hundred people down here” helping with cleanup. A New York City fire department battalion chief interviewed in 2019 did not recall Trump sending any workers to the site.
Trump’s 9/11 comments have also drawn scrutiny well beyond the buildings and the rubble. In 2016 he repeated a story that “thousands and thousands” of Muslim Americans were cheering in Jersey City, New Jersey, on the day of the attacks, but no evidence has been found to support it. In September 2019, he retweeted a video purporting to show Ilhan Omar dancing on the anniversary of the attacks, though CBS News reported she had been at an event organized by the congressional Black caucus, and that event was not held on September 11.
The pattern reaches back further still. In his 2000 book The America We Deserve, Trump mentioned Osama bin Laden as one of “a bewildering series of smaller crises” facing the United States. He later wrote in 2018 that the United States “should have captured Osama Bin Laden long before we did” and that he had pointed him out in his book “just BEFORE the attack on the World Trade Center.” The timeline itself does not quite sit still: al-Qaida’s embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania came in 1998, while Trump’s book was published in 2000, before September 11.
What remains unresolved is simpler than the claims around it. There is no contemporaneous record in the material provided that confirms Trump was carried out by firefighters after the attacks, and his newest account sits beside a long list of 9/11 statements that have not held up. That is why Tuesday’s remark matters now: it is not just another memory from the day, but another test of whether Trump’s version of 9/11 can be squared with the facts.
