Trump’s top six falsehoods about 9/11 as 25th anniversary nears

1. Claiming the attacks made his building the tallest in New York

Not long after the attacks, Trump said in a telephone interview with a local news anchor that the destruction of the World Trade Center – previously New York City’s tallest building – meant his 40 Wall Street property was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan.

“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 claimed. “And then when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest. And now it’s the tallest.”

It was not: 70 Pine Street, about a block away, held that distinction.

2. Claiming he helped clean up

Trump has repeatedly claimed to have assisted with the recovery from the World Trade Center’s collapse. “Everyone who helped clear the rubble, and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit,” he said at a campaign stop in 2016.

That comment was a rehash of one he made shortly after the attack, where he told a German broadcaster that “we’ll have a couple hundred people down here” helping with the cleanup.

In 2019, PolitiFact interviewed a New York City fire department battalion chief who did not recall Trump sending any workers to the site.

3. Lying about Muslims

When he first campaigned for the presidency in 2016, Trump repeated a story that “thousands and thousands” of Muslim Americans “were cheering” in Jersey City, New Jersey, on the day of the attacks in 2001.

Despite many fact checks, no evidence has been discovered to back up this claim.

4. Lying about Ilhan Omar

In September 2019, Trump retweeted a video that purported to show the Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Muslim 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 Omar had been dancing at an event organized by the congressional Black caucus, which was not held on September 11.

5. Claiming to have predicted the attacks

In his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, Trump mentioned the al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden as among “a bewildering series of smaller crises” faced by the US.

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.

That didn’t stop Trump from in 2018 writing 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.”

6. Fumbling the facts on firefighters

During a ceremony at the White House ellipse on Tuesday to honor emergency workers who responded to the attacks, Trump said that when he and a group of workers went to visit lower Manhattan shortly after the attacks, he was carried out by firefighters worried that the lower Manhattan skyscraper One Liberty Plaza – formerly known as 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,” the president claimed. “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 notes that Trump has told a version of this story before, including in an interview with Fox News that aired earlier this week. It appears to be a stretch.

While concerns about One Liberty Plaza’s stability did prompt the evacuation of at least one nearby building the day after the attack, there’s no evidence Trump was present, while his claim of bringing workers to the site is unsupported.