President Donald Trump has for years told false or unproven stories about what he supposedly saw and did on 9/11 and soon after. As the 25th anniversary of the terror attack approaches, Trump told another story at the White House on Tuesday — in which he claimed to have been carried away by firefighters amid fears of an imminent building collapse at some point after the attack.
It’s possible there are elements of truth in Trump’s latest story, versions of which he has told before, but he hasn’t provided any evidence for it. And some parts of his Tuesday account — which he delivered at an event honoring 9/11 first responders — are misleading at best. He was miles away from the World Trade Center on 9/11 and was not whisked out of any building near Ground Zero that day.
Asked for evidence for Trump’s story or more details about what supposedly happened, the White House did not provide any.
The White House said in an unsigned Tuesday email, “He was a private citizen at the time, not everything he did was documented.” Later in the day, spokesperson Davis Ingle pivoted to an attack on the media.
“President Trump spent the morning paying tribute to the heroic first responders who laid down their lives in service to others in the September 11th attacks and honoring their incredible families. The President was relaying his experience of a city reeling immediately after and in the days and weeks after the horrific attacks — and the fact that the failing legacy media is using this to try to attack him is a disgrace and yet another reason why Americans’ trust in the media is at an all-time low,” Ingle said.
