Donald Trump has often placed himself at the centre of events around the 9/11 attacks, peppering his speeches with anecdotes and references to the fateful day and its aftermath.
But many of Trump’s claims are not supported by evidence, and in some cases they have been proven to be false. Fact checkers have pored over the historical record without finding Trump in the places and situations he vividly describes.
The President, a native New Yorker, has vigorously defended his claims and attacked detractors. But biographers who have chronicled his life and work describe a pattern of self-aggrandising fantasies.
Trump claims he was saved by firefighters
This week, Trump repeated a claim that he had been rescued from an unstable building in New York’s financial district “right after” the attacks.
“The United States Steel building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down,” he said in a speech in Washington DC. “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 arm, said, ‘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.”
Former colleagues of the President say they were all at Trump Tower four miles away when the planes hit and he was not close to the scene that day. He has described witnessing the attack from his apartment in the building. Trump claimed on a separate occasion the incident occurred a “couple of days after” the attack.
The building he referred to was evacuated on 12 September 2001 over safety concerns but there is no evidence that Trump was there on that date.
Trump angrily rejected reports questioning his version of events this week, posting a clip on social media with footage of him speaking to reporters with the caption: “What Trump saw at ground zero hours after 9/11”. The video is date-stamped to 13 September.
Clip Trump posted on social media (Photo: Truth Social/Getty)Trump ‘provided hundreds of workers‘ to help
Trump has repeatedly stated that he contributed hundreds of construction workers to assist with emergency operations after the attack.
“I have a lot of men down here right now,” he told German TV station N24 two days after the attack. “We have over 100 and we have about 125 coming. So we’ll have a couple hundred people down here. And they’re very brave and what they’re doing is amazing. And we will be involved in some form in helping to reconstruct.”
Trump later added details to the account. “Everyone who helped clear the rubble – and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit,” he said during the 2016 election campaign. “We worked long and hard but it was just so terrible and so hopeless,” he told Fox News this year.
The account was questioned by leaders of the emergency response. Richard Alles, a New York Fire Department battalion chief, recalled “I spent many months there myself, and I never witnessed him. He was a private citizen at the time. I don’t know what kind of role he could have possibly played.”
Barbara Res, a former Trump Organisation construction executive, said Trump’s account would have been widely reported if true. “Listen, if he was there and he was escorted by firefighters and first responders, it would be the headline of The New York Times the next day.”
Tim O’Brien, author of biography Trump Nation, said the size of the Trump Organisation at the time was “a little bit over a dozen people” – making it impossible to send hundreds. However, as a property developer, Trump may well have been able to bring in contracted construction workers to help.
He also would have had his own casino staff elsewhere, in Atlantic City for example, who could have been brought in, although there appears to be no evidence of this.
The biographer suggested the account was a fantasy in comments to the New York Times. “He’s very comfortable propagandising that event for political purposes. Even in the face of tragedy, he can’t help but self-promote and self-aggrandise.”
Emergency workers in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack (Photo: Aaron Lee Fineman/Getty)Trump ‘saw people jumping from towers‘
The President’s accounts of what he saw that day have changed over the years. He famously called into a local television news channel hours after the attack to describe his view of the tower collapsing, and made the false claim that the fall of the World Trade Center left his 40 Wall Street Tower as the tallest building in the financial district.
Trump also told the station that he had spoken to a witness at the scene who saw “at least 10 people jumping out of the building”.
But on the campaign trail in 2015, Trump gave an account of himself watching people jump. “Many people jumped, and I witnessed it, I watched that,” he told a crowd in Ohio.
From Trump Tower about four miles away from the scene, it would have been almost impossible to see an individual jump. But footage of such scenes did play on television until the networks stopped showing them.
Thousands ‘celebrated fall of Twin Towers‘
Trump’s most inflammatory claim around the attacks is that he saw large-scale celebrations in areas with large “Arab populations” in New Jersey.
“Thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down,” he told a rally in Alabama in 2015.
The claim was rejected by the mayor of Jersey City as “shameful” and local police chiefs said there was no evidence for it. Several news outlets investigated the allegation and were unable to verify it, with a Washington Post fact check awarding it the lowest possible score for honesty.
Some news outlets reported on claims of small-scale incidents, such as a CBS News report on neighbours alleging that eight men had celebrated the attack on the roof of a Jersey building, although it is unclear if this was ever proven.
Trump’s donations to victims that never materialised
In October 2001, Trump pledged $10,000 (£7,380) on a live radio show to a fund for victims and first responders.
But multiple investigations, including by the New York City Comptroller’s office, found no record of such a gift based on a review of donation records, and concluded the future president “may have lied.”
Investigative outlet The Smoking Gun found that Trump did donate $1,000 to a controversial Scientology programme offering treatment to firemen who inhaled toxins.
A spokesperson for Trump did not dispute the specific claims but said he had donated “close to half a million dollars to organisations as a result of the 9/11 tragedy including the American Red Cross and the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Fund.”
The New York Daily News reported that Trump claimed a $150,000 federal grant from a fund for small businesses affected by 9/11.
What Trump’s claims say about his mindset, according to experts
Tony Schwartz, another Trump biographer who coined the term “truthful hyperbole” when ghostwriting The Art of the Deal, said he had an ability to “convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.”
Psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz suggest Trump’s embellishments were motivated by a need for attention. “Trump may abuse the truth so we take notice of him, think about him, become emotionally involved with him. Because he’s in no one’s heart, he wants to be in all our minds,” he wrote.
Dr Henry David Abraham, a psychiatrist who won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, told The i Paper: “In essence, Trump’s unverifiable claims of his involvement with the tragedy of the 9/11 attacks could be explainable by a differential diagnosis of narcissism, hypomania, and more likely than not, the clinical sign of confabulation.”
Confabulation happens when the brain unconsciously fills gaps in memory with false or distorted information without intending to deceive. Dr Abraham emphasised that without access to Trump’s records, however, he could not presume to diagnose him.
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