Donald Trump is once again putting himself at the center of New York’s 9/11 recovery story.
The president now says he went to New York the day after the attacks and “worked long and hard” on the recovery effort.
There’s just one problem: People who were actually running the massive operation at Ground Zero say they never saw him there.
Speaking Sunday on Fox News, Trump told host Trey Gowdy that he went to the World Trade Center site “very, very quickly” after the attacks and helped with construction and cleanup.
“I was building a building in New York and I had a lot of construction workers,” Trump said. “We worked long and hard but it was just so terrible and so hopeless.”
Trump went on to praise New York for rebuilding so quickly, describing the debris as “a mountain” and saying the new World Trade Center rose “within a relatively short period of time.”
But Trump’s own history of describing his role in the aftermath of 9/11 has repeatedly drawn scrutiny.
Richard Alles, a former New York City Fire Department deputy chief who arrived at Ground Zero roughly 20 minutes after the second tower collapsed and spent months at the site, said in 2019 that he had no knowledge of Trump being there or sending workers to help.
“If Trump had sent a crew of 100 workers, there would be a record of it,” Alles told PolitiFact. He said everyone working at the site operated under the supervision of the police and fire departments and the joint emergency-services command.
That doesn’t mean Trump wasn’t in the area.
He was in New York after the attacks and was photographed and interviewed near Ground Zero in the days that followed. But fact-checkers have found no documentation showing that he directly participated in the Ground Zero recovery operation or that he sent hundreds of workers to help with the search and rescue effort.
Trump has nevertheless repeatedly described himself as having been much more directly involved.
In 2016, he said he had been at Ground Zero and “helped a little bit” clear rubble.
“I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Buffalo.
Three years later, while speaking at the White House, Trump again placed himself at Ground Zero alongside first responders.
“I was down there also,” he said. “I spent a lot of time down there with you.”
Alles, who had been at the site for months, said he had never witnessed Trump there.
PolitiFact later concluded that Trump had been near Ground Zero after the attacks but found no record that he participated directly in the recovery effort.
Trump has also repeatedly claimed that he watched people jump from the towers from his apartment in Trump Tower.
“I watched those people jump and I watched the second plane hit,” he said during a 2015 campaign appearance.
But Trump Tower is roughly four miles from the World Trade Center site, making his account of what he could see from his apartment a matter of continuing scrutiny.
On the day of the attacks, Trump called into WWOR-TV and said he could see the World Trade Center from his office.
He also used the interview to boast about 40 Wall Street, claiming it had once been the tallest building in Lower Manhattan and was now the tallest again after the Twin Towers fell.
Two days later, Trump gave interviews from near Ground Zero and claimed he had more than 100 workers helping at the site. He later repeated variations of that claim for years.
But no independent evidence has emerged showing that Trump’s workers were part of the official Ground Zero recovery operation.
Now, 25 years after the attacks, Trump is again describing himself as part of the recovery story.
His comments come as New York prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Trump is not expected to attend the city’s anniversary memorial. All four living former presidents are expected to be there.
And while Trump continues to talk about the speed with which New York rebuilt, the people who actually spent months digging through the ruins, searching for victims and managing the recovery have left a much less flattering record of his role.
He was in New York. He was near Ground Zero. But whether he “worked long and hard” at the recovery effort is another story—and one for which the available record provides little evidence.
Watch the clip below:
Trump claims that after 9/11, "I went down, I was building a building in New York, and I went down there very shortly thereafter — the following day, you couldn't go down the same day — and we worked long and hard" pic.twitter.com/kt7IreXkVl
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 7, 2026
