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The White House has so far not provided any evidence for the story.
Three days before the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Donald Trump used a memorial event on the White House Ellipse to describe firefighters lifting him bodily out of a shaking building near Ground Zero.
By early Wednesday morning, that account was under attack from fact-checkers, and Trump was still typing.
In a 476-word post sent late Tuesday and continuing into Wednesday, September 9, Trump insisted, “Everything I said was exactly accurate and, to prove the point, I am attaching clips of me there with numerous of my people.”
He then shifted the timeline of his own story, writing that he was at Ground Zero “obviously not on the same day as the collapse, but shortly thereafter, with a large group of Construction Workers.”
What Trump told the crowd at the Ellipse
At the Steel Across America ceremony on Tuesday, held around a 21-foot beam recovered from the South Tower, Trump told the audience that two firemen “grabbed me under the arm, said, ‘Got to get out of here,’ and they literally lifted me up.” He said the U.S. Steel Building, now One Liberty Plaza, was creaking under him at the time.
PolitiFact found no record of any such rescue and no evidence Trump brought hundreds of workers to the recovery site. A former FDNY battalion chief told the fact-checker “there would be a record of it.”
Trump was at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan on September 11, 2001, about 2.5 miles from the World Trade Center.
Trump goes after “Maggot”
In the same overnight post, Trump attacked New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, whose recent piece questioned his 9/11 plans, calling her “Maggot” and “an unattractive person both inside and out.”
The attack came after the Times reported that Trump would attend the Pentagon ceremony instead of the National September 11 Memorial in Manhattan, where politicians have been barred from delivering speeches since 2012.
The White House’s non-answer
When CNN’s Daniel Dale pressed the White House for documentation, an unsigned email replied only that “He was a private citizen at the time, not everything he did was documented.”
No supporting evidence was produced.
The 25th anniversary of the attacks falls on Friday, September 11.
