As the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks nears, President Donald Trump has once again shared accounts of his experiences in the aftermath of the tragedy that lack supporting evidence. During a White House event honoring first responders on Tuesday, the President claimed that firefighters carried him away from a building amid fears of an imminent collapse. While versions of this story have been told previously, the President has not provided documentation or evidence to substantiate the claim, and several aspects of his account remain misleading.
When asked for clarification or evidence regarding the President’s story, the White House did not provide specific details. In an unsigned email, the administration stated, “He was a private citizen at the time, not everything he did was documented.” Later, spokesperson Davis Ingle addressed the matter by criticizing the media, stating that the President was relaying his personal experience of a city in crisis. Ingle characterized the media’s focus on these claims as a disgrace and an attempt to attack the President.
A primary point of contention involves the timeline of the President’s location. While he began his recent anecdote by mentioning he went to Ground Zero “right after this happened,” he was actually miles away at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan when the attacks occurred. A former Trump Organization executive noted in 2016 that the President did not engage in unusual activity that day. Although the President suggested in a 2016 version of the story that the incident occurred “a couple of days” after the attacks, there is no public evidence placing him inside the building he identified—known as One Liberty Plaza—during that period.
There were indeed documented instances of panic regarding the structural integrity of One Liberty Plaza in the days following the attacks, leading to evacuations of rescue workers and journalists on September 12 and September 14, 2001. During a September 13, 2001, interview with NBC, the President described how workers would flee when whistles signaled potential building collapses. However, he did not state at that time that he was personally involved in such an evacuation, and there is no proof he was swept up in these specific events.
Furthermore, the President has previously claimed to have organized a crew of 100 workers to assist with recovery efforts at Ground Zero. Richard Alles, a retired New York Fire Department battalion chief who served on 9/11, stated in 2019 that he never witnessed the President at the site. Alles emphasized that all recovery work was conducted under the direct supervision of the police and fire departments, and that such a large, organized crew would have left a formal record. While media reports from shortly after the attacks noted the President giving high-fives to volunteers and officers near the site, no evidence exists to support his claims of leading a recovery team.
The President also asserted that One Liberty Plaza “still creaks,” implying lingering structural instability. This claim is unfounded; the building reopened in October 2001, less than two months after the attacks, and has functioned as a normal office building ever since. As the anniversary approaches, these recurring, unverified narratives continue to draw scrutiny regarding their factual basis. The report also notes that president Donald Trump has for years told false or unproven stories about what he supposedly saw and did on 9/11 and soon after. The report also notes that versions of which he has told before, but he hasn’t provided any evidence for it, it’s possible there are elements of truth in Trump’s latest story. The report also notes that “President Trump spent the morning paying tribute to the heroic first responders who laid down their lives in service to others in the September 11th attacks and honoring their incredible families. The report also notes that with his comments about how he feared the US Steel building was “coming down on top of us” and about how a firefighter said “gotta get out of here,” Trump left open the impression that he was inside an unstable building. The report also notes that he made clear he wasn’t inside when the firemen supposedly lifted and moved him; he said the building that appeared on the verge of collapse was “not so far from us.”, in Trump’s 2016 telling of the story. The report also notes that trump alluded to a similar situation when he was interviewed on September 13, 2001, telling NBC of workers at Ground Zero: “Every few minutes, a whistle would go off and everybody would just run, because you have all the buildings around it, which are in such a weakened state that people just don’t know. The report also notes that and then they come back, and they’re working under 50-story buildings that you don’t know if they’re going to fall down, and so they just have to take off.
