Trump claims firefighters carried him from ground zero days after 9/11 attack
Trump said there were fears a nearby building would collapse during his visit.
President Donald Trump, at an event earlier this week honoring those who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attack, claimed that firefighters carried him away from ground zero when he visited the site in the days after the 9/11 attacks. It’s part of an evolution of the president's claims about his involvement in events in the days and weeks following the attack.
"I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened," Trump said during Tuesday’s Tunnel to Towers Foundation's event, repeating one of his claims that he brought hundreds of construction workers to ground zero after the 9/11 attack.
"The United States Steel building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down," Trump said of what appeared to be a wobbly building, now known as One Liberty Plaza, nearby.
"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 arms, said, 'Got to get out of here.' And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me,” Trump continued.
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said Trump was "relaying his experience of a city reeling" in the aftermath of the attacks, but shared no proof the incident occurred. Ingle pointed to online posts from the president on Tuesday night of images of him in New York City in the days after the attacks.
Trump's posts were prompted after New York Magazine called his story about the firefighters a "weird lie about where he was on 9/11."
"I was there, obviously not on the same day as the collapse, but shortly thereafter, with a large group of Construction Workers,” Trump posted on social media on Tuesday, adding of his speech earlier in the day, "everything I said was exactly accurate."
It is not the first time Trump has told a version of this story, though there is no evidence it happened.
"I've never seen anything like I saw, and they heard a screech, and everybody thought that the U.S. Steel building was coming down and it was not so far from us," Trump said at a campaign event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in January 2016. "And these two guys there were massive guys, two really big -- because I'm a big guy and they grabbed me. I must tell you, honestly, I never knew I could run that fast."
Over the years, Trump has made several other unsubstantiated claims about 9/11. One of those was that he saw the attack firsthand, though Trump Tower is four miles away from the site.
"I was looking out from a building in midtown Manhattan directly at the World Trade Center when I saw a second plane, at a tremendous speed, go into the second tower," Trump said at an anniversary event in 2019.
He also claimed to witness thousands of Muslim celebrating the attack.
"Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down," Trump told rally goers in Birmingham, Alabama, in 2015. "Thousands of people were cheering."
It has never been confirmed that those massive celebrations happened, and Trump's campaign at the time failed to provide proof.
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