Donald Trump kept the focus on 9/11 facts this week with another account that does not line up. At a White House event commemorating the attacks on Tuesday, he said firefighters carried him out because One Liberty Plaza might collapse. That sits beside a long record of disputed and false claims about September 11.
White House Event Remark
Trump said he was carried out by firefighters worried that the lower Manhattan skyscraper One Liberty Plaza — formerly known as the US Steel Building — would collapse. The account adds another layer to the version he has repeated over the years about where he was and what he saw after the attack on the World Trade Center.
His earlier statements followed a similar pattern. Shortly after the attacks, he said 40 Wall Street was now the tallest building in downtown Manhattan. The problem is direct: 70 Pine Street, about a block away, held that distinction instead. He also told a German broadcaster that “we’ll have a couple hundred people down here” helping with the cleanup, then said in 2016 that he helped clear the rubble after the World Trade Center collapsed.
Trump, Jersey City, and Omar
In 2016, he said “thousands and thousands” of Muslim Americans were “were cheering” in Jersey City, New Jersey, on the day of the attacks. No evidence has been discovered to back up that claim. A New York City fire department battalion chief interviewed by PolitiFact in 2019 did not recall Trump sending any workers to the site, which leaves his cleanup story without independent support in the record presented here.
Trump also used September 11 in political attacks. In September 2019, he retweeted a video that purported to show Ilhan Omar dancing on the anniversary of the attacks. CBS News reported that Omar had been dancing at an event organized by the congressional Black caucus that was not held on September 11. He attached the line, “The new face of the Democrat Party!”
Osama bin Laden and X
The pattern stretches back further. In The America We Deserve, Trump mentioned Osama bin Laden as among “a bewildering series of smaller crises” faced by the US. In 2018, he wrote on X that the US “should have captured Osama Bin Laden long before we did” and added, “I pointed him out in my book just BEFORE the attack on the World Trade Center.”
The latest remark matters because it lands during the run-up to the 25th anniversary of September 11 and adds to a stack of public statements that have repeatedly mixed memory, politics, and claims that do not match the available record. Readers trying to separate the new anecdote from the older ones are left with the same practical problem: the story keeps changing, but the evidence behind it does not keep pace.
