Of all the topics that could do without President Trump’s habitual off-the-cuff hyperbole, the 9/11 attacks rank high on the list.
President Trump, speaking on the Ellipse on Tuesday at a ceremony honoring the victims of the 9/11 attacks:
For three months after September 11th, the flames raged in the rubble of Ground Zero. For nine months, rescue and recovery crews worked day and night on the site. I want to just thank my people. I took a lot of my — I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened, and they were — they had no hesitation. Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do. I’ll be honest. It was — it was raw. Nobody’s seen anything like it, ever. We had other buildings. The United States Steel Building was creaking. Really creaking. Now, we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is it creaked a lot. It creaked. There’s still creaks, but uh, it never came down. And I’ll never forget two firemen. 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, 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. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down. US Steel.
Aaron Rupar characterized those remarks as, “Trump claims he was basically lifted out of the rubble on 9/11.” That’s not really an accurate description, although a listener could easily come to that conclusion, if they don’t know that the “U.S. Steel building” was the name of One Liberty Plaza from 1972 to 1980, and that One Liberty Plaza is one block east of the site of the South Tower.
Trump had told another version of this story, way back in 2016, except then it was “a couple of days” after the attacks, not “right after it happened.”
But when the World Trade Center came down, I watched these incredible people rebuild from the day it came down, literally, they were there when other buildings in the surrounding area they thought were going to fall.
And you had people working, trying to help the most horrific sights you’ve ever seen. Trying to help, do whatever they could. And I was there when we actually thought the U.S. Steel building was coming down, and I’ll never forget that I was standing next to these two massive wonderful firemen and we heard a screech, like a screech, steel on steel and it was a couple of days after the buildings and I was down there with the — we had a crew of people that, you know, to help.
I mean it’s — they needed a lot of help. 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. 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.
I — but they were running just as fast and they had my arms and they were and we were just running and these are incredible people.
One Liberty Plaza was indeed damaged during the 9/11 attacks, but the building remained structurally sound. From the New York Times, October 17, 2001:
One Liberty Plaza, the sleek black skyscraper just east of the World Trade Center, was the subject of numerous reports of collapse and serious structural damage in the hours and days just after Sept. 11. Rumors of its demise, however, were premature. The building is reopening, with a celebration scheduled for Monday. A ribbon will be cut at the 54-story building, which has arguably been pronounced ”structurally sound” more times than any other skyscraper in the city.
”There are no structural concerns with this building,” said Ilyse Fink, the director of communications for the city’s Department of Buildings, reinforcing a message she has delivered almost daily since Sept. 12. ”It is not and was not in danger of collapse. The building is structurally sound.” . . .
Among the buildings in the area, 1 Liberty Plaza was unusual because of the numerous erroneous news reports, including one broadcast on CNN, that the building had collapsed. In fact, the building also had its own rumor mill and its own running joke, which made its way up from the street all the way to the Department of Buildings: ”Oops, Liberty Plaza just collapsed again.”
But just about the only kinds of repairs that the building needed were the replacement of hundreds of windows that had been blown out on its western facade and the removal of heavy dust and debris.
This past weekend, Trump sat down for an interview with Trey Gowdy of Fox News Channel, and he offered another variation of this story.
“I was building a building in New York, and I had a lot of construction workers, and I went there very shortly thereafter, the following day, you couldn’t go down the same day, but, like, the following, very, very quickly afterwards,” Trump said. “We worked long and hard, but it was just so terrible and so hopeless. It was so hopeless. Such a terrible thing.”
There are no records of Trump visiting Ground Zero or photographs of him there. There is video of him somewhere in lower Manhattan on September 13, saying he had “100 men working down here” and he was there “just to spur them on. . . . I just want to give them some support. . . . They’ve been down here for about a day and a half.”
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but of all the topics that could do without Trump’s habitual off-the-cuff hyperbole, the 9/11 attacks rank high on the list. Assuming the broad contours of Trump’s story are accurate — that some days after the attacks, he visited One Liberty Plaza and was hastily evacuated by firefighters when they worried the building might collapse — Trump’s impulse to tell this story ignores the fact that 9/11 wasn’t and isn’t about him, and this week isn’t the time or place to tell stories that make himself the center of the story.
Also in that Gowdy interview, Trump said: “People can say what they want about New York, but they rebuilt that project so fast it was so incredible to see.”
“Fast” is a relative term. The Freedom Tower didn’t begin construction until 2006; in 2008, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg fumed, “Progress on the redevelopment of the World Trade Center has been frustratingly slow, owing in large part to a multilayered governance structure that has undermined accountability from the get-go.” The tower reached its final symbolic height of 1,776 feet when the spire was installed on May 10, 2013, nearly twelve years after the attacks. The Freedom Tower opened for business on November 3, 2014.
For comparison, it took five years to build the Twin Towers.
If Joe Biden had told a story like Trump’s, it would get intense coverage and ridicule in the right-of-center media, and deservedly so. In fact, Biden did tell a story like this, back in 2023. Biden said, “And I remember standing there [Ground Zero] the next day and looking at the building, I felt like I was looking through the gates of hell.” Biden visited Ground Zero more than a week later, on September 20.
Critics of the octogenarian president contended that his memory was fading, and that he had become a rambling, oblivious Mr. Magoo. But that was the previous president, nothing like the current one, of course.