President Donald Trump arrives to speak during the Tunnel to Towers Foundation event on the Ellipse near the White House in Washington on Tuesday.
Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
President Trump took part in the Tunnel to Towers Foundation’s Steel Across America tour Tuesday, delivering remarks from the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., in honor of the upcoming 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
But naturally, his appearance couldn’t pass without a bit of unpleasant weirdness. Trump did honor first responders and the nearly 3,000 victims of the attacks, but he also used his speech to offer yet another questionable anecdote about his whereabouts and actions in the aftermath of the tragedy.
The president told the assembled crowd that he had been working on a “big building” when the attacks took place and that he took the entire construction crew down to ground zero “right after this happened.” It was then, Trump claims, that a pair of firefighters rushed him to safety out of concern that the nearby U.S. Steel Building, which is now known as One Liberty Plaza, was at risk of collapse. Trump said Tuesday that the building was “creaking” at the time.
“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 and said, ‘Gotta get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing,” Trump said.
Trump on 9/11: I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened., Wasn’t too much we could do. We had other buildings, the United States steel building was creaking. I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming… pic.twitter.com/kEt6IO71qR
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 8, 2026
CNN’s Daniel Dale, known for his extensive fact-checking efforts during Trump’s time in office, quickly rebutted the president’s claims. “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,” Dale wrote.
Dale continued, “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.”
Similarly, PolitiFact noted that while there were concerns at the time One Liberty Plaza might collapse, Trump was not mentioned in recollections about it. In addition to his retelling on the 2016 campaign trail, Trump also appears to have told a version of this story during a 2021 Newsmax interview, calling it a “scary situation.”
This is far from the first time Trump has seemed to embellish his post-9/11 actions. In 2019, the New York Times dug into a claim the president made while signing a bill to fully fund the medical care of 9/11 first responders. During the Rose Garden event, Trump reportedly claimed he spent a large amount of time alongside emergency workers at ground zero in the days following the attacks. “Many of those affected were firefighters, police officers and other first responders. And I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you,” he said, per the Times.
But Richard Alles, a retired New York Fire Department deputy chief, told the Times he personally never saw Trump at the Twin Towers site. “I spent many months there myself, and I never witnessed him,” he told the outlet. “He was a private citizen at the time. I don’t know what kind of role he could have possibly played.”
In an interview Trump gave to a German outlet two days after the attacks, he claimed he had 100 men down working at the ground zero site with another 125 planned to join them. But USA Today noted that there’s no evidence a crew was sent.
In 2015, Trump told the crowd at an Columbus, Ohio, campaign rally he personally saw people jumping from the World Trade Center. “Many people jumped, and I witnessed it — I watched that. I have a view, a view in my apartment that was specifically aimed at the World Trade Center,” he said, per CNN. “And I watched those people jump, and I watched the second plane hit … I saw the second plane hit the building, and I said, ‘Wow, that’s unbelievable.” But CNN also noted at the time that Trump’s penthouse apartment in midtown Manhattan was four miles away from the towers, a logistical reality that likely would make it impossible for Trump to have seen what he claimed.
Trump has also invoked inflammatory rhetoric when discussing 9/11 in the past, falsely claiming in 2015 that he saw Muslim Americans in nearby New Jersey celebrating the attacks — comments that state officials and critics swiftly denounced false and Islamophobic.
Trump’s most infamous comments about 9/11, however, came hours after the attacks, when he phoned into Secaucus’s WWOR-TV that afternoon and described seeing the explosion from a window in Trump Tower, which gave him a view of the city’s skyline. “I’d see the Empire State Building in the foreground and the World Trade Center in the background. And now I’m looking at absolutely nothing. It’s just gone. It’s just hard to believe,” he said during the interview. But when the anchor asked whether a Trump building in the Financial District, 40 Wall Street, had been damaged, the future president boasted that his building was now the tallest in the city following the attacks, a statement that was ultimately debunked.
“40 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. And now it’s the tallest,” he said.
As New York City prepares to mark the solemn 25th anniversary of the attacks on Friday, Trump will be taking part in a ceremony held at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, instead. The New York Times reported last month that the president won’t be present at the ground zero ceremony because he wanted to give a speech, something that is prohibited at the apolitical event. Instead, Vice-President J.D. Vance will represent the White House. Former presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden are all expected to attend as well.
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