Donald Trump is on the defensive over one of his most extraordinary claims about 9/11, and instead of letting the controversy die, he spent Tuesday night making it much bigger.
At a ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Trump described what he said was a terrifying moment in which two “big, strong” firefighters supposedly grabbed him and carried him to safety as the U.S. Steel Building near the World Trade Center appeared to be in danger of collapsing.
“The United States Steel Building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down,” Trump said.
He then offered a remarkably detailed account of his alleged rescue.
“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,” Trump said. “They literally lifted me up.”
Trump said the firefighters started running with him and that he told them, “Fellas, I can run myself.”
There is one enormous problem with the story: there is no evidence that Trump was at the World Trade Center when this supposedly happened.
Trump was at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan when the attacks began. Trump Tower is more than two miles from the World Trade Center site.
CNN’s Daniel Dale said the story is, at minimum, unproven and contains misleading elements. Dale noted that Trump’s remarks could leave the impression that he was at or near Ground Zero shortly after the attacks, when he was actually at Trump Tower when the attacks occurred.
And rather than backing away, Trump doubled down.
The president responded with a 476-word Truth Social rant in which he insisted that his account was accurate and began posting old videos and photographs that he said proved he had been at Ground Zero.
“Well, I don’t think I would be the first thing on anyone’s mind but, I was there, obviously not on the same day as the collapse, but shortly thereafter, with a large group of Construction Workers,” Trump wrote.
“Everything I said was exactly accurate.”
Trump also posted footage from interviews he gave on September 13, 2001, including one in which he said he had just visited what was being called Ground Zero.
In another post, he declared: “I was there as soon as the Law allowed.”
Those videos do establish that Trump spoke publicly about visiting the area shortly after the attacks. They do not, however, establish his more dramatic claim that firefighters physically carried him away from the U.S. Steel Building, or that he was there with a large construction crew helping with the recovery operation. Fact-checkers have found no evidence corroborating those claims.
And then came the family intervention.
Fred Trump III, the president’s nephew and the son of Donald Trump’s late older brother Fred Trump Jr., publicly contradicted his uncle’s account.
“I try not to comment personally about my uncle,” Fred Trump III wrote Tuesday. “But his claim that he brought a crew of workers to help at the site so offends me that I need to speak out.”
Fred specifically disputed Trump’s claim that he had been involved in constructing a large New York building when the attacks happened and then brought his workers to Ground Zero.
“He was not,” Fred wrote.
He also challenged Trump’s description of the U.S. Steel Building, now known as One Liberty Plaza, as a building that was “creaking” and in danger of collapsing.
Fred said the grandfather of a close friend had been one of the building’s original engineers and that another engineer he knew was called in to inspect the structure after the attacks.
“While people were originally concerned, it was eventually cleared for occupancy—not creaking and ready to fall,” Fred wrote.
The White House did not provide evidence supporting Trump’s version of events.
Instead, spokesperson Davis Ingle accused the media of exploiting Trump’s recollections of the days and weeks following the attacks.
“The president was relaying his experience of a city reeling immediately after and in the days and weeks after the horrific attacks,” Ingle said, while accusing the media of trying to attack Trump.
But that doesn’t answer the basic question: Where is the evidence for the firefighter rescue Trump described?
There isn’t any that has been publicly produced.
Then Trump went after Maggie Haberman.
Trump also used his lengthy post to attack New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, whom he repeatedly insults as “Maggot Hagerman.”
Haberman had reported on Trump’s plans for the 25th anniversary, including his decision to commemorate the attacks at the Pentagon rather than attend the official Ground Zero ceremony in New York.
Trump insisted that the reason had nothing to do with being denied an opportunity to speak.
“Maggot knows that this is a lie!” Trump wrote.
He insisted that he had attended New York’s 9/11 ceremonies numerous times and that speeches aren’t given at the official ceremony.
But Trump’s explanation conflicts with what Vice President JD Vance said last week.
Asked why Vance would attend the New York ceremony instead of Trump, Vance said the administration had simply decided that he would go to New York while Trump remained in Washington to commemorate the Pentagon attack.
“We just decided as a team that I would go to New York for 9/11 and the President would stay here in D.C.,” Vance said.
Trump’s Truth Social tirade did little to settle any of this.
If anything, it raised even more questions.
He posted a September 18, 2001, photograph of himself outside the New York Stock Exchange. He posted a September 13 interview in which he discussed the devastation at Ground Zero. He posted another NBC interview from the same period and repeated the same short clip twice.
All of that establishes something fairly straightforward: Trump did visit the area after 9/11.
It does not establish that he was there during the dramatic episode he described Tuesday, or that firefighters grabbed him under the arms and carried him away from a collapsing building.
Because Trump’s latest story isn’t simply about whether he visited Ground Zero.
It is about a specific account of what supposedly happened to him there. And after 25 years, there is still no public evidence that the most dramatic part of that story ever happened.
Now, for perhaps the first time, someone from Trump’s own family is publicly saying so.
