If Donald Trump is still breathing, he’s lying.
When he’s not making accusations disguised as confessions, he’s overcompensating for his lifetime of failures by creating lies on top of lies, with some distraction tactics in the middle for good measure. It’s a MAGA Mille-feuille of immorality, and yet Cult 45/47 eats it up and asks for more from Donny Three-Card Monte.
It’s basically become an annual tradition for Trump to lie about 9/11, with his false claims of bravery and helping at Ground Zero to his obtuse boasts of having the tallest building left in Manhattan after the towers fell. But the lies he’s told this week, as Americans braced themselves for the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, are possibly his most egregious lies of all.
Everyone has a “Where were you?” story about that day, and we tell those stories as part of the collective mourning the country experienced, because we’ll never forget. I grew up in New Jersey and I could see the Twin Towers from my bedroom window. I had been to the top on school field trips, and any time we flew anywhere, a glimpse of the World Trade Center from the plane meant we were almost home. The skyline still looks incomplete to me, and probably always will.
On the day of the attacks, I had been living in the Portland metro area for six months. My mother, brother, and sister-in-law were working in Manhattan. My stepfather was in Brooklyn and had to walk home to the Upper West Side. I watched the coverage from 3,000 miles away. I managed to get ahold of my brother in his Midtown law office before the phone lines went down. He had just left a firm after only a couple of months because, as he told us, it just wasn’t the right fit for him. He was discouraged by a lot of people from making the move, and was told to stick it out, but he trusted his gut and went anyway. The firm he left was in a building near the World Trade Center that collapsed in the aftermath, making it all feel extra personal for me.
Donald Trump’s lies about 9/11 are centered on stolen valor and began on the day itself, when we were all experiencing a national tragedy and had no idea if we were going to be attacked again. He couldn’t keep from inserting himself into the narrative from the beginning; his narcissism just couldn’t allow for the idea that he wasn’t part of the conversation about the biggest event in American history. He saw blanket media coverage and used it as an opportunity to talk about himself, and has done so every year since.
We cannot let him rewrite the history we all witnessed, which is still so visceral that many of us still can’t watch footage even a quarter of a century later. While we feel the gravitas of the day, Trump keeps using it to puff himself up.
But he was nowhere near Ground Zero on 9/11, and we know this because he called into a local TV station, WOR (Channel 9), to claim he witnessed the second plane hitting the World Trade Center as he stood with a “group of people” in his office at Trump Tower. It’s an interesting snapshot of how he was manipulating the media, even back when he was just this gross, chauvinistic playboy hitting the Manhattan social scene with his wives, and the women he dated when he was between wives.
However, some simple geography, math, and the Empire State Building blocking his view dispute his claims of witnessing the second plane hit.
My mom actually did witness the second plane hitting the World Trade Center. She worked on the top floor of the Carnegie Hall Tower, which has 60 floors and 360-degree unobstructed views of Manhattan in all four directions. I often visited her at work when I lived in Manhattan in the mid-’90s, and always made the full walk around the floor to take in all of the views. I don’t know how many times I glimpsed the WTC from there, but it was always there. Until it wasn’t.
Anyway, lots of people called out the latest lie, despite Trump saying, “I’ll never forget how two big firefighters pulled me out…”
Which never happened, but also sounds like a fantasy he’s had for years. There was plenty of pushback online, so then he went and did this.
TL;DR: HE IS LYING.
MAGA has yet to call him out for this despicable lie. The media is silent. He went to Dallas for his midterm convention and stood up and lied more, and then he lied on Thursday about the attendance breaking records when the joint was mostly empty.
There isn’t anything Trump won’t lie about, and that’s what makes him so dangerous. From COVID to the Iran War to Gaza to whatever the latest awful thing he’s done, his lies have an unacceptable body count. He lied about why he’s vandalizing Washington. He lied about the 2024 election. And he’ll never stop lying about the Epstein Files.
The question is, when will MAGA stop letting him lie to them? This latest outrage about what must be America’s most solemn day must be the final straw.
And the follow-up is, when will the media stop helping him lie to all of us?
The post This vile lie must be MAGA’s last straw appeared first on Raw Story.
