Donald Trump chuckled through some cringe chunks of a speech about 9/11 that included whoppers both familiar and brand new — including the widely-debunked claim that he and his workers dug through the rubble after the attacks.
This year marks 25 years since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, as well as 25 years of Trump lying, misleading, or just plain being weird about the attacks. We recently documented dozens of examples, but Trump can’t seem to stop.
On Tuesday morning, Trump gave a speech on The Ellipse, dubbed a “Steel Across America” event, to unveil a steel beam from Ground Zero that will travel across the country to commemorate the anniversary.
Things got weird pretty quickly as Trump gave a quippy retelling of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s heartbreaking experience that morning.
Lutnick was not at the World Trade Center for the attack because he was driving his son to his first day of school, which he was doing reluctantly as a result of “four years” of nagging in Trump’s telling. It was his son’s first day of kindergarten.
Trump even let out a little chuckle when he said that “you could say he owes a lot to his son, and he owes a lot to his wife,” and then added, “because of that he got to see it from the West Side Highway.”
He also joked, of Lutnick, “He’s got some faults, but overall he’s excellent.”
Trump also tried out a gag he’s been using lately where he gets angry that someone is more loved or more popular than he is — not exactly a tough hurdle.
But in this case, he made the joke about a deceased 9/11 hero while his family watched from the audience.
Then suddenly a rescuer appeared. They call him the Man in the Red Bandana. Have you heard that term? The Man in the Red Bandana has become more famous than me. I don’t like it.
Very unhappy about it. He’s become much more famous than me.
And earlier in the speech, Trump put some extra stank on the long-debunked claim that he led a team of hundreds down to the Pile the day after the attacks to help out with the recovery.
This time, he added that two firefighters literally picked him up and carried him to safety from a building they thought might collapse.
I want to just thank my people. I took a lot of my — I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened, and they were — they had no hesitation. Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people.
It wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest. It was raw. Nobody’s seen anything like it, ever.
We had other buildings. United States Steel Building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is, it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks. But it never came down.
And 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, said, “Gotta get out of here,” and they literally lifted me up. This isn’t easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, “Fellas, I can run myself.”
But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down — U.S. Steel.
Daniel Dale performed a detailed fact-check of the claim on X, calling bullshit on multiple elements:
President Trump was not in the vicinity of the World Trade Center when it was hit. He was in Trump Tower, miles away from the towers and nearby One Liberty Plaza, which is/was also known as the US Steel building.
There was public concern in the days following the attack that One Liberty Plaza 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. 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 definititely 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.
While campaigning in 2016, he told a version of today's story about being whisked away from One Liberty Plaza by big firemen, but he said in 2016 that the alleged incident happened "a couple of days" after 9/11 and claimed the creaky building was "not so far from us," instead of leaving open the impression he might've been a) inside it b) on 9/11 itself.
Trump is set to give a speech at the Pentagon on September 11 after he reportedly blew off the Ground Zero memorial in part because they wouldn’t let him speak, a report that triggered him into a vicious attack on Maggie Haberman.
for context, I was in OLP (One Liberty Plaza) that morning and not only were there no firefighters (they were at the towers or directing folks to safety) but there was no one entering the building. Everyone was LEAVING. Trump was not there.
Just More and More "Lies against humanity!" Such a BSer ! Always rewriting his-story via
DON THE CON!