Trump claims he helped clear rubble

At a ceremony honoring first responders, Trump said he took his construction crew to ground zero after 9/11 and helped clear rubble. He later clarified he arrived days after the attack, not on September 11 itself.

“I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened.”

Fire chief says he never saw Trump there

A retired New York City Fire Department deputy chief who supervised cleanup efforts said he never witnessed Trump at the site and doubted his account was accurate.

“He was a private citizen at the time. I don't know what kind of role he could have possibly played.”

Trump's firefighter rescue story

Trump claims two firefighters grabbed him inside the U.S. Steel Building when it was creaking and might collapse, then lifted and carried him to safety. No evidence corroborates this account.

“They grabbed me under the arms, said, 'Gotta get outta here.' And they literally lifted me up.”

His actual location on 9/11

Trump was at home in Trump Tower, about four miles north of the Twin Towers. He watched the attacks from his apartment window and called a New Jersey news station that day.

“I have a window that looks directly at the World Trade Center, and I saw this huge explosion.”

His story about seeing the second plane

Trump has sometimes claimed he watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center from his apartment. In his live phone interview on 9/11, he made no mention of witnessing the second jet.

Conflicting accounts of people jumping

Trump has claimed he personally saw people jumping from the Twin Towers. In his actual 9/11 phone interview, he said someone else told him about people jumping, not that he witnessed it himself.

The Muslim celebration claim

Trump has repeatedly claimed he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering as the World Trade Center collapsed. Researchers found only one possible instance of a few Arab American teenagers that could loosely resemble this.

“I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering.”

His building height claim was wrong

On 9/11, Trump said his Forty Wall Street building was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan after the World Trade Center fell. Records show it was never the tallest, and only briefly held that title in the 1930s.

“Forty Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan. And now it's the tallest.”

Welles Crowther honored with medal

The ceremony centered on awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to Welles Crowther, the man in the red bandana who rescued over a dozen people before the South Tower collapsed.

Trump makes it about himself

While presenting the medal to Crowther's parents, Trump compared his own fame to the fallen hero's, saying Crowther had become more famous than him and expressing unhappiness about it.

“The Man in the Red Bandana, he's become more famous than me, I don't like it.”

Using 9/11 to attack opponents

Recently, Trump has invoked 9/11 alongside World War I, World War II, and Pearl Harbor to argue that communism poses a greater threat to America than all those historical disasters combined.

Historian explains the pattern

A presidential historian says Trump takes pieces from the past and reshapes them into politically useful stories. As he ages, new recollections about events that never happened may become more frequent.

“He was relaying his experience of a city reeling from the attacks.”

Few consequences for false claims

Other presidents might have faced career-ending backlash for fabricating details about 9/11. Trump has rarely paid a political price for his misleading statements about that day.

9/11 health crisis continues

Twenty-five years later, the health toll from 9/11 keeps growing. The number of survivors receiving cancer treatment assistance has roughly tripled in the past five years.

City misled about air quality

Recently released city records show that New York officials misled residents about air quality in the days following the attacks, adding to ongoing questions about what the government owed those affected.