Trump Repeats Disputed Yarn About His 9/11 Role

 https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-repeats-disputed-yarn-about-his-9-11-role.html

The president told the assembled crowd that he had been working on a “big building” when the attacks took place and that he took the entire construction crew down to ground zero “right after this happened.” It was then, Trump claims, that a pair of firefighters rushed him to safety out of concern that the nearby U.S. Steel Building, which is now known as One Liberty Plaza, was at risk of collapse. Trump said Tuesday that the building was “creaking” at the time. It wasn’t clear if by “right after” he meant the day of the attacks or sometime in the following days.

On Tuesday night, Trump defended his remarks in a Truth Social post, attacking our coverage and writing that everything he said at the Ellipse event was “exactly accurate.” But the president notably clarified that while he did visit ground zero, he was there “obviously not on the same day as the collapse, but shortly thereafter, with a large group of Construction Workers.”

Trump’s latest rendition of his 9/11 stories raised eyebrows. CNN’s stalwart fact checker Daniel Dale quickly responded to the president’s claims. “President Trump was not in the vicinity of the World Trade Center when it was hit. He was in Trump Tower, miles away from the towers and nearby One Liberty Plaza, which is/was also known as the US Steel building,” he wrote on X.

Similarly, PolitiFact noted that while there were concerns at the time One Liberty Plaza might collapse and it had to be evacuated on September 12, Trump was not mentioned in recollections about it. In addition to his retelling on the 2016 campaign trail, Trump also appears to have told a version of this story during a 2021 Newsmax interview, calling it a “scary situation.”