Fact check: Trump’s story about being carried away by firefighters after the 9/11 attack
By Daniel Dale, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump has for years told false or unproven stories about what he supposedly saw and did on 9/11 and soon after. As the 25th anniversary of the terror attack approaches, Trump told another story at the White House on Tuesday — in which he claimed to have been carried away by firefighters amid fears of an imminent building collapse at some point after the attack.
It’s possible there are elements of truth in Trump’s latest story, versions of which he has told before, but he hasn’t provided any evidence for it. And some parts of his Tuesday account — which he delivered at an event honoring 9/11 first responders — are misleading at best. He was miles away from the World Trade Center on 9/11 and was not whisked out of any building near Ground Zero that day.
Asked for evidence for Trump’s story or more details about what supposedly happened, the White House did not provide any.
The White House said in an unsigned Tuesday email, “He was a private citizen at the time, not everything he did was documented.” Later in the day, spokesperson Davis Ingle pivoted to an attack on the media.
“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 President was relaying his experience of a city reeling immediately after and in the days and weeks after the horrific attacks — and the fact that the failing legacy media is using this to try to attack him is a disgrace and yet another reason why Americans’ trust in the media is at an all-time low,” Ingle said.
Here’s a look at what Trump said Tuesday and what the facts are.
What Trump said
Breaking down Trump’s story
Trump wasn’t close to the World Trade Center during the attack or later that day
Trump didn’t specify when the firemen supposedly helped him, but by beginning the story by saying he went to Ground Zero “right after this happened,” he at the least left open the impression that he was whisked to safety on the day of the attack. But that couldn’t have happened because he was miles away, at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan, when the attack occurred. A former Trump Organization executive told Politico in 2016 that Trump did not do much out of the ordinary that day.
In a 2016 version of the story, Trump claimed the moment the firemen helped him happened “a couple of days” after the attack.
There’s no public evidence Trump was in the ‘US Steel building’ soon after the attacks
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. But there is no public evidence he was actually in the building he was referring to (better known as One Liberty Plaza in 2001 and still today) in the days after the attacks. Two days after the attack, he was interviewed outdoors in the general vicinity of Ground Zero.
In Trump’s 2016 telling of the story, 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.”
There was indeed unfounded panic about One Liberty Plaza, though no proof Trump was swept up in it
In the days after the attack, there were fears that One Liberty Plaza would collapse even as city building officials said it was structurally sound; CNN reported that rescue workers and journalists were evacuated from the building on September 12, 2001, and The Washington Post reported that rescue workers were rushed away again on September 14, 2001.
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. And so they just have to take off, 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. So it’s a terrible thing for the workers and it’s a terrible thing for the world, really.”
It is possible Trump was personally swept up in one of these moments of panic, too. But there’s no proof of that, and he didn’t tell NBC that he was talking about himself running.
There’s no public evidence Trump had a crew helping with the rescue effort
This time, Trump didn’t explicitly say that he or his workers helped to clear rubble or otherwise assisted with rescue and recovery at Ground Zero. But he has made such explicit claims in the past, and this time he immediately thanked “my people” after mentioning the work of rescue and recovery crews. So it’s worth noting that he has never presented evidence for his claims that he worked at Ground Zero or organized a group that worked at the site, let alone the 100-strong group of workers he has previously claimed.
“I spent many months there myself, and I never witnessed him,” Richard Alles, a retired New York Fire Department official who was a battalion chief on 9/11 and who attended a Trump White House event in 2019, told The New York Times in 2019. Alles told PolitiFact in 2019 that if Trump had sent a crew of 100 workers, “there would be a record of it. Everybody worked under direct supervision of the police and fire department and the joint commander for emergency services.”
The Associated Press reported in 2016, “News accounts from days just after 9/11 include references to Trump giving high-fives to police officers and volunteers on their way to the World Trade Center site.”
No basis to say One Liberty Plaza ‘still creaks’
Trump said, “The truth is it creaked a lot, it creaked. It still creaks.” There is no basis for this claim. The One Liberty Plaza office building reopened in October 2001, less than two months after 9/11, and functions normally today.
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