Trump Adds to 9/11 Claims, Says Firefighters Carried Him Away as Building Threatened Collapse
President Trump again falsely claimed today that he was at Ground Zero just after the 9/11 terror attacks.
The president claimed that two burly firefighters lifted and rushed away from impending danger when he went to the site of the carnage.
The problem: It never happened.
People who were at the scene such retired deputy chief fireman Richard Alles long ago said Trump’s claims of 9/11 derring do are a fantasy.
As with President Biden’s many fanciful yarns from his past, those concerned about the president’s health and fitness for office might think that Trump isn’t lying, but instead conjuring the false memories associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease.
Then again, Trump doesn’t seem to show the same signs of cognitive impairment as Biden.
Past Claims
Trump’s claim today at an event honoring Ground Zero first responders mirrors false claims in the past. They began right after 19 imported Muslims boarded airliners and brought down the World Trade Center, hit the Pentagon, and were headed for the U.S. Capitol when heroic passengers attacked the cockpit and forced the plane down in Pennsylvania.
The suicide hijackers murdered 2,977 people.
“Many of those affected were firefighters, police officers and other first responders,” Trump said on July 29, 2019 on signing a bill in the White House’s Rose Garden to fund health care for 9/11 emergency workers:
And I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you.
That wasn’t true.
“I spent many months there myself, and I never witnessed him,” Alles told The New York Times. Alles attended the Rose Garden signing ceremony.
“He was a private citizen at the time,” Alles continued:
“I don’t know what kind of role he could have possibly played.”…
Mr. Trump’s claims about where he was and what he was doing during the attacks date back years, with him often inserting and removing details along the way, Timothy O’Brien, the author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,” said in an interview.
“Donald Trump was absolutely not a first responder by any standard definition,” Mr. O’Brien said. “If we’re defining it as the first wave of people who arrived at ground zero to provide help, he was not in that wave.…
By the time Mr. Trump hit the campaign trail in 2015, those initial stories had evolved into a mishmash of unproven claims: At a rally, he said he had watched people jump with his own eyes — possibly through a “solid gold” telescope — at Trump Tower. That claim is unproven, and Trump Tower is about four miles from the World Trade Center site. He also shared another widely debunked claim that Muslims in New Jersey were celebrating after the planes hit.
Trump not seeing Muslims celebrate the event does not mean none did.
Fact-checking Trump’s claim at the same event, Politifact detailed other of Trump’s 9/11 fantasies of heroism.
Trump told a German television station that he was at the scene.
“I have a lot of men down here right now,” Trump said:
We have over 100 and we have about 125 coming. So we’ll have a couple hundred people down here. And they are very brave and what they’re doing is amazing. And we will be involved in some form in helping to reconstruct.
Trump said the same thing to NBC News.
During his campaign in 2016, Trump claimed he was on the scene, clearing rubble.
“Everyone who helped clear the rubble — and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit — but I want to tell you: Those people were amazing,” Trump said at a rally in Buffalo, Politifact noted:
“Clearing the rubble. Trying to find additional lives. You didn’t know what was going to come down on all of us — and they handled it.”
The Washington Post and the Associated Press sought information from the Trump campaign in 2016 about how he helped, and they didn’t receive responses. We also tried to verify his claim and could not.
Politifact spoke to Alles:
“I was in a supervisory role with the fire department at the time,” said Alles, who said he was on the scene about 20 minutes after the second building collapsed. “I was there for several months — I have no knowledge of his being down there.”
If Trump had sent a crew of 100 workers, “there would be a record of it. Everybody worked under direct supervision of the police and fire department and the joint commander for emergency services. Is there a chance he was ever down there by himself and I didn’t know it? It’s possible, but I know of no one who ever witnessed him there.”
Today’s Tall Tale. False Memory
And today, Trump was at it again.
“I just thank my people. I was building a big building in New York and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened and they had no hesitation,” Trump said:
Everybody 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 raw – nobody ever seen anything like it, ever. We had other buildings — United States Steel building was creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is it creaked a lot. It creaked — it still creaks. But it never came down.
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 arms [and said], “you 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. They thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down.
That never happened, as AI.com reported.
As The New American repeatedly reported during the Biden administration, President Biden often concocted tall tales:
- He was a long-haul truck driver;
- He was arrested during a civil-rights protest;
- He helped desegregate a theater;
- His son, Beau Biden, died in Iraq;
- His legal career began with a case involving an industrial accident;
- He crossed a bridge in Baltimore on a train; and,
- Cannibals ate his uncle during World War II.
Biden clearly wasn’t lying when he told those stories. That meant he was likely suffering false memories, or confabulation, a common symptom of declining cognitive ability associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease.
But Biden also showed other signs of cognitive decline. A top official revealed that Biden was almost certainly impaired. The Wall Street Journal and other outlets confirmed it.
Trump has been telling the 9/11 tale for years. That might suggest not cognitive impairment, but instead that he has been retailing a naked, self-aggrandizing lie. But maybe he’s told the story so many times he believes it.
