At an event honoring those who died on Sept. 11, 2001, President Trump on Tuesday claimed that two firefighters lifted him up and carried him away from a seemingly unstable building when he visited the area shortly after the terrorist attacks.
This was the latest in Mr. Trump’s evolving — and often disputed — account of his actions on Sept. 11 and in its aftermath, when he was working as a real estate developer in New York City.
Mr. Trump was watching television the morning of the attacks, which is verifiable from news coverage of that day, but what he did next has long been a matter of debate. He has repeatedly said that he took a construction crew with him to Lower Manhattan and was deeply involved in cleaning up the site, a claim that has been called into question by at least one former fire official who was involved in the recovery effort.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump renewed his claim that he had taken a crew to a building near the site where the World Trade Center had stood shortly after the attacks. He said that two large firefighters picked him up and took him to safety when he observed an unstable building.
“I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened,” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday during an address from the Ellipse.
He went on: “The 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 arm, said, ‘Got to get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up. This is not 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.”
Almost from the moment the planes hit the towers, Mr. Trump has sought to position himself close to the recovery effort. He has also made a series of questionable and provocative statements to burnish his political brand, notably by sharing a widely debunked claim that Muslims in New Jersey were celebrating after the planes hit.
At least one former official who spent time at the site has disputed Mr. Trump’s claims about his whereabouts over the years. In 2019, Richard Alles, a retired deputy chief with the New York Fire Department, attended a ceremony at the White House where Mr. Trump signed into law a bill that would permanently fund the care of emergency workers who became ill after the attacks.
“I spent many months there myself, and I never witnessed him,” Mr. Alles said in an interview with The New York Times about Mr. Trump, shortly after that ceremony. “He was a private citizen at the time. I don’t know what kind of role he could have possibly played.”
On Tuesday, though, Mr. Trump left the impression that he had been at the site in the immediate aftermath. “I’ve never seen such an unbelievable mass of steel and, unfortunately, bodies and everything you can imagine,” Mr. Trump told the crowd, which had gathered to pay tribute to the police officers and firefighters who had been killed in the attack, including a stock trader and volunteer firefighter named Welles Crowther, whom Mr. Trump posthumously awarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In response to questions asking for more information about Mr. Trump’s story about being carried by firefighters, the White House press office sent a clip of Mr. Trump delivering a speech on the campaign trail in 2016. In that speech, Mr. Trump said he had traveled to the former U.S. Steel building, now known as 1 Liberty Plaza, in downtown Manhattan with a crew “a couple of days after” the World Trade Center towers came down.
“I must tell you honestly,” Mr. Trump said, “I never knew I could run that fast.”
In an interview on Fox News that was broadcast before Tuesday’s ceremony, Mr. Trump said he traveled to the site of the attacks “very quickly afterwards.” He and a crew “worked long and hard,” he said, “but it was just so terrible and so hopeless. It was so hopeless, such a terrible thing.”
On the day of the attack, Mr. Trump called into WWOR-TV to say that he had a window in Trump Tower that looked directly over the World Trade Center, and talked about a building he had in the area. Trump Tower is about four miles away from the site of the attacks.
“Forty Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest. And then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest,” Mr. Trump said of the building he owned. “And now it’s the tallest.” (It wasn’t.)
In the days after the attack, Mr. Trump became something of a commentator. In an interview with a German television station on Sept. 13, 2001, Mr. Trump was asked if he would be personally involved in the recovery effort.
A photo taken of him on Sept. 18, 2001, has been used in a widely circulated meme that claims Mr. Trump personally traveled to ground zero with hundreds of workers to help uncover victims. Timothy O’Brien, a Trump biographer, said that Mr. Trump would not have had many workers on hand to send to the site, because the Trump Organization “had a dozen people working there” at the time.
Barbara Res, an executive vice president in charge of construction at the Trump Organization, who left the company in the late 1990s, said Mr. Trump was adept at getting news coverage for himself.
“Listen, if he was there and he was escorted by firefighters and first responders, it would be the headline of The Times the next day,” Ms. Res said. “He’d make that happen.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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