Preening Trump Revives Questionable Tale About His Role Following 9/11

Former President Donald Trump has reposted a message glorifying his generous, courageous role after 9/11 , when he claimed to have arrived at Ground Zero in downtown Manhattan with “hundreds” of workers he was paying to help “find and identify victims.”

None of Trump’s story has ever been substantiated by fact-checkers or witnesses. 

He reposted the message created by a group called “Raging Patriots” on Truth Social Wednesday with a brazen note: “A great honor to have done so!”

What Trump was known to have done soon after the terror attack that toppled the World Trade Center towers was to brag that he suddenly had the tallest building in the city at 40 Wall St. 

That was a lie . 

“I have a window that looks directly at the World Trade Center, and I saw this huge explosion,” Trump said in a phone interview with a New Jersey TV station on Sept. 11, 2001. “I really couldn’t even believe it. Now, I’m looking at absolutely nothing. It’s just gone. It’s just hard to believe.”

He then pointed out that his building at 40 Wall St. “actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest [building]  ... and then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest. And now it’s the tallest ,” added an upbeat Trump.

In fact, another building — not Trump’s — became the tallest after the attack that killed more than 3,000 people.

Alan Marcus, president of a New Jersey public relations firm that represented Trump and his businesses through the ’90s, told The Washington Post  in 2018: “I didn’t like his line about having the biggest building in downtown. But that’s just how he talked. By Donald’s standards, he was probably very good. He was trying to behave.”

As for Trump’s claim about soon visiting Ground Zero with his workers, no one investigating the story has ever found any evidence to substantiate it. Fact-checking website Snopes said it was impossible to verify any of Trump’s statements, in part because the details were too vague.

A German TV station  interviewed Trump near the site two days after the attack, but he was dressed in a suit and tie with every hair in place, and showed no evidence he’d been working there — nor was he with any men. Trump claimed in the interview that he had more than 100 of his workers on the ground then with another 125 on the way. 

He made vaguely similar claims in 2019 in a speech at the Pentagon on the 18th anniversary of the attack, and insisted he had “spent a lot of time” with first responders.

A retired New York deputy fire chief, Richard Alles, who spent months working at Ground Zero, told The New York Times  that Trump was “not a presence” after the attack.

“I never witnessed him ... He was a private citizen at the time. I don’t know what kind of role he could have possibly played,” Alles said.

As for a Trump force of workers at Ground Zero, Alles said there would certainly have been some record of that, and there is none.