Everyone knows that convicted felon Donald Trump is a prolific liar, making up statistics and blatantly misrepresenting the news to fit his own agenda. But his latest twist on an old lie may just be the sickest to date. During an event at the Pentagon honoring 9/11 first responders, Trump claimed that firefighters rescued him from a building when he visited the area “right after” the attack.
“I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened,” Trump said Tuesday. “Wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest. It was raw. Nobody’d 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. … But it never came down. 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 and said, ‘Got to 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.’”
When the attacks began, Trump was actually nowhere near the World Trade Center. Instead, he was miles away in Trump Tower. Later that day, he even called into a news show to brag about how he had the “tallest” building in Lower Manhattan after the Twin Towers had fallen—a disturbingly egomaniacal comment.
But it’s not the first time Trump has told a version of the lie that he went to Ground Zero soon after the attacks. In reality, he almost certainly did not visit the rubble in the days after the attacks, according to CNN reporter Daniel Dale, noted for his fact-checking of public figures.
“There was public concern in the days following the attack that One Liberty Plaza [the former U.S. Steel Building] 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,” Dale wrote on X, in response to a video of Trump’s claims.
Dale continued, “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.”
And it’s not even the only lie Trump has told about 9/11. As Dale notes, Trump has claimed that he personally went to the site of the fallen towers, and sent “over 100” employees to help assist reconstruction and recovery efforts. However, there is no evidence that he did that, either.
“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,” Richard Alles, a New York Fire Department battalion chief who held a supervisory role in the rescue and recovery efforts, told Politifact in 2019.
In the end, Trump was disinvited to the 25th anniversary ceremony at the World Trade Center memorial this week—largely because he insisted on being allowed to give remarks at the event, The New York Times reported. And given Trump's ever-evolving lies about the recovery efforts and his role in it, it’s clear why.





