Donald Trump told Fox News’s Trey Gowdy that he went to Ground Zero the day after September 11, 2001, and worked hard there, as part of his memory of the 25th anniversary of the attack.He said, “I had an apartment where I could see the World Trade Center from midtown.I was downtown, but it wasn’t very far when the building was 115 stories tall.And I was watching this happen, and I was saying, ‘That’s crazy.It couldn’t be a plane.Maybe it was a missile.’” Trump shared this during an interview on Sunday Night In America With Trey Gowdy.
He continued:
And then I saw the second plane hit, and you saw that coming, and you’re watching it and it’s — because I watched the air patterns for years, and you know where the planes are, they go right up the Hudson River. This thing was coming right into the second building. And I said, “Wow!” So I watched that happen, and I said “Wow, we are now in a different time.” So I saw it and I said “The world has just changed.” And I went down. I was building a building in New York and I had a lot of construction workers, and I went shortly after, the following day. You couldn’t go down the same day. But, like the following day. Very quickly afterwards, and we worked long and hard.
Trump has often told the story about helping clear rubble on 9/11.
At a 2016 rally in New York, he said, “Everyone who helped clear the rubble, and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit, but I want to tell you those people were amazing.Clearing the rubble, trying to find additional lives, you didn’t know what was going to come down on all of us, and they handled it.”
He has also said that he had “a couple hundred people down there” helping with recovery efforts.
However, PolitiFact, USA Today, and Poynter reported that they couldn’t confirm whether Trump paid workers or was actually there.Newsweek called this claim “False” in a fact check.In a February 2024 article, Newsweek said, “To this day, there has been no evidence that Trump helped clear rubble or helped find survivors on 9/11.” They added, “While Trump did visit Ground Zero in the days after the attack, analysis of his comments then and from reports at the site have not led to any evidence that he helped with the recovery.Trump did tell a German television reporter two days afterward that ‘he had a lot of men’ helping.”
Trump’s comments around the 9/11 attacks have long upset critics.
In a TV interview on the day of the attack, he boasted about having the tallest building in Lower Manhattan after the World Trade Center fell.“Donald, you have one of the landmark buildings down in the financial district, 40 Wall Street.Did you have any damage, or what’s happened down there?” an interviewer asked Trump.
Trump replied, “Forty Wall Street actually was the second tallest building in downtown Manhattan.
And it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest.And then when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest, and now it’s the tallest.”
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