Three Days Before the 25th Anniversary, Trump Tells a Room of 9/11 First Responders That Two Firemen "Literally Lifted Me Up" and Carried Him From a Creaking Building Near Ground Zero — a Veteran of the Wars That Followed Answers That "This Solemn Day Is Not About Trump"

September 11, 2026

At a Sept. 8, 2026 ceremony on the White House Ellipse honoring 9/11 emergency responders, President Trump described his own role in the aftermath of the attacks. He said he had sent a construction crew to the site — "I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened" — and that when the U.S. Steel Building, now One Liberty Plaza, began to give way, two firefighters carried him out: "They grab me under the arms. They literally lifted me up … They lifted me up and they started running with me." Fact-checkers at CNN, PolitiFact, PBS, Snopes and Newsweek could find no evidence for either claim. Trump was four miles uptown at Trump Tower on the morning of the attacks — he phoned WWOR-TV that day and said "I have a window that looks directly at the World Trade Center" — and no firefighter has ever come forward to corroborate the rescue. CNN's Daniel Dale wrote that when he asked the White House for evidence, "the White House provided none." John Feal, who supervised demolition at Ground Zero beginning Sept. 12, 2001 and later founded the FealGood Foundation, told Snopes he saw no sign of hundreds of Trump-hired workers at the site. The reaction split along familiar lines but with an unusual wrinkle: Trump skipped the New York commemoration entirely — reportedly because the ceremony does not let politicians speak — and Vice President JD Vance represented the administration at Ground Zero, where all four living former presidents appeared together. Sen. Ted Cruz defended the account on CNN, saying "the man is a New Yorker, he loves New York." Rep. Jason Crow, an Army veteran of the wars that followed the attacks, called Trump "a small and sick man." The White House answered the fact-checks by attacking the press, and Trump himself posted a defense on Truth Social conceding he was there "obviously not on the same day as the collapse."