by Nick Taylor
Donald Trump lies. That’s a given. If he were not the President of the United States this wouldn’t matter. But his lies hurt the country, cast doubt on the credibility of the United States, and most recently hurt the memories of those who died on 9/11 and the many more who died because of 9/11 illnesses.
Trump’s lies about 9/11 place him at the center of events that he was never remotely close to. Their purpose is to elevate himself and quiet his unquenchable thirst for praise and attention. These are lies about a tragedy with victims and heroes, whose pain and sacrifice are the true story of September 11, 2001.
These early fall days can be so beautiful, just like that morning that all of us who were here remember, the air crisp, the sky a vivid blue. A good day for flying, as the Saudi hijackers knew when they took over the planes they flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the one that was taken back from them by heroes who crashed it in a field in Pennsylvania before it could strike the U.S. Capitol.
The terrorist attacks killed 2,753 people in New York. A TV reporter called Donald Trump, the real estate developer who was always good for a quote, Trump said he had seen it on TV and then watched from the windows of his office in the Trump Tower, which was four miles to the north. He said it was terrible. He went on to say that his building at 40 Wall Street had been the second tallest building in lower Manhattan but now, with the collapse of the World Trade towers, he had the tallest.
When the fact checkers weighed in, Trump turned out to have had the third tallest building downtown and now he had the second tallest. But truth to Trump was irrelevant then, and it is irrelevant now.
Two days after the attack, on September 13, he positioned himself as close to Ground Zero as civilian non-emergency workers were allowed to get, near what was then the U.S. Steel building. Reporters couldn’t fail to miss the tall blond man in the dark suit. He was happy to answer their questions.
“I have a lot of men down here right now,” he told a gaggle of reporters. “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.”
He’s repeated that story ever since. He wanted to help, he recently told a Fox News interviewer, so he took a big crew of his workers to Ground Zero the next day, “very quickly afterward. And we worked long and hard.”
Nobody remembers ever seeing him or any crew of workers identified with him working at or near Ground Zero.
He recently produced a new memory that he revealed at a Washington event honoring 9/11 emergency responders. It was his miraculous rescue by two firefighters. He was downtown near what was then the U.S. Steel Building at 1 Liberty Street when the building started to creak and he thought it would collapse.
“We thought it was coming down on top of us,” he said, “and two firemen, big strong guys — 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. But they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down.”
Nobody remembers that. No pictures. Nada.
The traditional anniversary ceremony in New York at the 9/11 memorial and museum bars speeches to keep things nonpartisan, with a focus of the victims. That’s probably why Trump planned to attend a memorial event at the Pentagon, where speeches are allowed.
Trump’s need to lie has metastasized, as Trump turned 80 in his second presidential term, into what some call a descent into dementia. His social media posts, featuring AI images and memes, are increasingly unhinged.
People dismiss this behavior as Trump being Trump. But his lies and social media behavior go hand in hand with his senseless war with Iran that has no end in sight and had no plan from the beginning, and the costs of gas and groceries that are eating into American, including MAGA American, pocketbooks. Now he says he’ll call the Strait of Hormuz, Trump Strait.
With the midterm elections coming up, he’s now offering voters $5,000 gift checks if Republicans win and stay in control of Congress. Which would add more trillions to the deficit, if he could even do that. Trump bankrupted several casinos before he entered public life.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, we can only hope that we bid adieu to Donald Trump’s lies and in the midterm elections vote for people who tell the truth.
