Latest disputed claim: firefighters carried Trump from One Liberty Plaza, he says

The Guardian’s inventory threads through roughly 25 years of public statements by Trump, beginning with telephone interviews in the days after the towers fell and continuing through Tuesday’s White House Ellipse ceremony honoring emergency workers who responded to the attacks. The Guardian sets each claim against the documented record and, where available, prior fact-checking.

The earliest claim came within days of September 11, 2001. Trump told a local news anchor by telephone that his 40 Wall Street property, previously New York City’s second-tallest building in lower Manhattan, was now the tallest in the area after the World Trade Center’s destruction. “I mean, 40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan. And it was actually before the World Trade Center was the tallest,” Trump said. “And then when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest. And now it’s the tallest.” The Guardian reported the claim was contradicted by the record, noting that 70 Pine Street, roughly a block away, held that distinction at the time.

During his first presidential campaign in 2016, Trump repeated a story that “thousands and thousands” of Muslim Americans in Jersey City, New Jersey had been “cheering” on the day of the attacks. Despite many fact-checks, The Guardian reported no evidence has been discovered to support the claim.

At a 2016 campaign stop, Trump also said he had personally helped with the recovery at ground zero. “Everyone who helped clear the rubble, and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit,” he said. In 2019, PolitiFact interviewed a New York City Fire Department battalion chief who did not recall Trump sending any workers to the site. Trump had made similar remarks shortly after the attack, telling a German broadcaster that “we’ll have a couple hundred people down here” helping with cleanup.

In September 2019, Trump retweeted a video that purported to show Representative Ilhan Omar, a Muslim American and the first Somali American to serve in the US Congress, dancing on the anniversary of the attacks, calling her “the new face of the Democrat Party!” CBS News reported that the video showed Omar dancing at an event organized by the Congressional Black Caucus, which was not held on September 11.

The Guardian also flagged a passage from Trump’s 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” in which he mentioned Osama bin Laden as among “a bewildering series of smaller crises” faced by the United States. At the time, bin Laden was known to Americans because al-Qaida had in 1998 orchestrated the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In 2018, Trump wrote on X that the US “should have captured Osama Bin Laden long before we did,” adding: “I pointed him out in my book just BEFORE the attack on the World Trade Center.”

The newest claim came at Tuesday’s White House ceremony. Trump said that when he and a group of workers visited lower Manhattan shortly after the attacks, he was physically carried out by firefighters concerned that One Liberty Plaza, formerly the US Steel Building, would collapse. “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,” Trump said. “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.”

PolitiFact noted that Trump has told a version of this story before, including in a Fox News interview that aired earlier in the week, and characterized the claim as appearing to be a stretch. According to The Guardian, while concerns about One Liberty Plaza’s stability did prompt the evacuation of at least one nearby building the day after the attack, no evidence has emerged that Trump was present, and his claim of bringing workers to the site is unsupported.