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

Former President Donald Trump has sent a message again extolling his generous and courageous role after 9/11, when he claimed to have arrived at Ground Zero in midtown Manhattan with “hundreds” of paid workers to help “find and identify victims.”

None of Trump’s stories have been corroborated by fact checkers or witnesses.

He retweeted a message created by a group called “Raging Patriots” on Truth Social Wednesday with a cheeky note: “Great job done!”

What Trump did after the terror attack that brought down the World Trade Center towers was boast that he suddenly owned the tallest building in the city at 40 Wall St.

“I had a window that looked right into the World Trade Center, and I saw this huge explosion,” Trump said in a phone interview with a New Jersey TV station on September 11, 2001. “I really couldn’t believe it. . . . Now, I don’t see what- what. It’s just gone. It’s just hard to believe.”

He then pointed out that his building at 40 Wall St. [building] …then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest. And now that’s the top,” added an optimistic 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 in the 90s, told The Washington Post in 2018: “I don’t like him about having the biggest building downtown. But that’s just what he said. By Donald’s standards, that’s probably pretty good. He’s trying to act.”

As for Trump’s claim about soon visiting Ground Zero with workers, no one who has investigated the story has found any evidence to back it up. The fact-checking website Snopes said it could not verify Trump’s claims, in part because the details were unclear.

A German TV station interviewed Trump near the site two days after the attack, but he was wearing a suit and a tie in every hair, and showed no evidence that he had ever worked there – nor did any men. Trump claimed in an interview that he has more than 100 employees in the field and with another 125 on the road.

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

Retired New York deputy fire chief Richard Alles, who spent months working at Ground Zero, told The New York Times that Trump was “absent” after the attack.

“I never witnessed him… He was a private citizen at the time. I didn’t know what role he might have played,” Alles said.

As for Trump’s forces working at Ground Zero, Alles said there would certainly be some record of that, and there is none.