Trump’s 9/11 claims collide with record as anniversary nears
As US marks 25 years since attacks, president's accounts — from Ground Zero heroics to slurs against Muslims — are contradicted by evidence
NEW YORK (MNTV) — As the United States approaches the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, President Donald Trump is again invoking that day — and again making claims about it that the documented record contradicts, turning a national trauma into personal and political mythology.
Trump has long cast himself as a New Yorker who witnessed the devastation and aided the recovery, but his accounts blur recollection, storytelling, and fact.
Shortly after the attacks he claimed his 40 Wall Street building had become downtown Manhattan’s tallest — untrue, as nearby 70 Pine Street remained taller. During his 2016 campaign he said he had gone to Ground Zero and “helped a little bit,” and had sent hundreds of workers to assist; a city fire-department battalion chief later told PolitiFact he had no memory of Trump sending anyone.
At a recent White House ceremony, Trump added a new account — that firefighters physically carried him from lower Manhattan for fear a nearby tower would collapse.
Buildings in the area were indeed evacuated over structural fears, but no evidence places Trump at such a scene or supports his claim of bringing workers to the site.
The most damaging claims have targeted Muslims.
In 2016 Trump asserted that “thousands and thousands” of Muslim Americans in Jersey City had celebrated the attacks — an allegation repeatedly fact-checked and never substantiated, but which fed a narrative casting Muslim Americans as collectively sympathetic to terrorism.
In 2019 he amplified a video falsely purporting to show Representative Ilhan Omar dancing on the 9/11 anniversary; the event had not occurred on that date, and the episode showed how misinformation about the attacks could be weaponized against a prominent Muslim politician.
Trump has also portrayed a passing mention of Osama bin Laden in his 2000 book as having “predicted” the attacks.
But bin Laden was already a known threat by then, after al-Qaida’s 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania — naming him among many dangers was not a prophecy.
The stakes, advocates note, go beyond fact-checking: presidential accounts of a tragedy that killed thousands and reshaped American life carry lasting weight, and turning that history into self-glorification or a weapon against Muslim communities, they argue, dishonors those who actually endured it.
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