Donald Trump has added an extraordinary claim to his already extraordinary list of claims about how he helped out in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.
Trump, 80, has spent the 25 years since the 9/11 attacks offering a constantly shifting account of what he did and where exactly he was that week. He gave his latest during an interview with Fox News on Sunday, just five days before the quarter centennial of the attacks.
“I went down,” he said. “I was building a building in New York and I had a lot of construction workers, and I went down there very shortly thereafter, the following day, you couldn’t go down the same day, but like, the following day, very quickly afterwards, and we worked long and hard, but it was just so terrible, so hopeless.”
Trump has said before that he visited the site, but it seems to be the first time he’s dated that trip. He made the claim in 2019 during a signing ceremony at the White House for a bill to fund healthcare for first responders, and again in a 2021 interview with Newsmax where he said “two big firemen” had to pull him clear of a building they thought might collapse. Both times, he never said when exactly.
Those claims have raised more than a few eyebrows among those who helped out in the aftermath. “I spent many months there myself, and I never witnessed him,” Richard Alles, a former deputy chief with the New York Fire Department who attended the 2019 signing ceremony, told the New York Times.
Trump had said at that event that “I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder,” and that “I spent a lot of time down there with you.” Alles said those claims only raised more questions because Trump “was a private citizen at the time” and it was unclear “what kind of role he could have possibly played.”
The president gave an interview to a German broadcaster two days after the towers went down. He spoke with the station’s journalists several blocks from the wreckage and said he had more than 100 construction workers helping out, with around 125 more on the way.
The Beast reported in 2016 that if those claims were true, there’s a good chance that dozens of those workers would since have suffered from illnesses related to the toxic wreckage, like many others who attended the site. Trump’s spokeswoman did not confirm whether any of his employees had fallen ill or, if so, what he’d done to help them get treatment and support.
Trump’s biographer Timothy O’Brien later told the New York Times that the president only employed around 12 people at the Trump Organization at the time, making it unclear exactly how he’d have marshaled in hundreds to help out. “He’s very comfortable propagandizing that event for political purposes,” as O’Brien put it. “Even in the fact of tragedy, he can’t help but self-promote and self-aggrandize.”
What’s a matter of record is that on the day of the attacks, Trump put in a call to WWOR-TV in Secaucus, New Jersey. He steered parts of that conversation toward 40 Wall Street, one of his buildings in downtown Manhattan. He claimed that it was now the tallest building in the area after the World Trade Center collapsed. It was not.
The president has also said at various times that he personally witnessed people jumping from the buildings, despite being four miles away, and that he gave generously to charities involved in the recovery effort, claims that have never been backed up. He also claims to have seen “thousands and thousands” of American Muslims cheering on the attacks. No such footage exists.
Trump repeatedly attacked former President Joe Biden after the Democrat wrongly claimed in 2023 he had visited the wreckage on the day after the attacks, when he in fact toured it eight days later. “He said he was at the World Trade Center and he wasn’t,” Trump himself then wrongly claimed in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press that September.
Biden, along with former presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, will attend the 25th anniversary ceremony in New York on Wednesday. Trump is headed to the Pentagon instead, with his Vice President JD Vance expected to fill in for him at the New York service. The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
