Two Big Firemen and 25 Years of Bullshit: Donald Trump Has Never Stopped Lying About 9/11

September 8, 2028 Donald Trump has no bottom. Tuesday morning, three days before the 25th anniversary, Donald Trump stood outside the White House with FDNY brass, accepted a flag made with steel from the South Tower, and then made the whole thing about himself. Again. Here's the story he told, more or less verbatim: 'I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened. Wasn't too much we could do. We had other buildings, the United States Steel building was creaking. I'll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen. Big, strong guys. And I'm not the smallest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arms. They 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.' Two firefighters carried an 80-year-old man's younger self out of danger like a sack of potatoes, and the punchline is that he's big. At a 9/11 memorial event. In front of the department that lost 343 people that morning and more than 600 since. I want to walk through this one, and then every other lie he's told about that day, because this isn't a gaffe. It's a 25-year pattern of a man stealing the worst morning in American history and wearing it like a costume. Trump Tower. 725 Fifth Avenue, at 56th Street. That's roughly four miles north of the World Trade Center. About 6.5 kilometres for the Canadians. Not walking distance. Not 'the smoke was in my lungs' distance. It's a cab ride you'd complain about. We know this because of what he did that afternoon, and it's on tape. While the towers were still burning and the city was still counting, he phoned in to WWOR-TV in Secaucus, New Jersey. Here's what he said on the air: '40 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.' That's the first thing on the record from Donald Trump about 9/11. Not grief. Not shock. Real estate rankings. Thousands of people are dead or dying under rubble and this guy is doing skyline math on live television. It was also a lie. 70 Pine Street is 25 feet taller than 40 Wall. He couldn't even get the brag right. Two days later, September 13, he did turn up near the site. Not at it. Near it. Long enough to do interviews. He told a German TV crew he had 'over 100' of his men working the pile with 'about 125 coming.' He told NBC he had 'hundreds of men inside working right now.' He told a scrum 'a hundred men' with 'another 100 in a little while,' and threw in that 'a couple of them got hurt.' Three different numbers in one day. None of them true. Tim O'Brien, who wrote 'TrumpNation' and got sued by Trump for his trouble, told the New York Times the entire Trump Organization at the time was 'a little bit over a dozen people.' You can't send hundreds of workers to Ground Zero when your whole company fits in a minivan. Richard Alles was an FDNY battalion chief that day and spent months on the pile. He's been asked about this repeatedly. His answer has never changed: 'I was there for several months. I have no knowledge of his being down there.' And on the phantom crew: 'There would be a record of it. Everybody worked under direct supervision of the police and fire department.' The crews came from the trade unions, not from Trump. The Daily Beast made another point in 2016 that nobody's ever answered. If Trump really sent hundreds of his own workers into that toxic dust, a good number of them would be sick or dead by now. Where are they? Who paid for their care? His people have never produced a single name. Now back to Tuesday's story, because it's a fascinating piece of fiction if you know its history. Donald Trump did not tell this story in 2001. Or 2005. Or 2011. Or when he was running for president in 2016 and would have killed for a heroic 9/11 anecdote. Or during four years in the White House. The 'two big firemen' made their debut on Newsmax on September 8, 2021. Twenty years after the fact. Nearly to the day. Here's the 2021 version: 'We were hearing creaks, I've never forgotten it, it was I think the United States Steel Building it was called at the time, and it's 50 stories tall, and we heard creaks. I said 'that building is going to come down,' and two big firemen grabbed me, and grabbed other people, and they just moved out of that area. Never came down.' Notice what happened between 2021 and 2026. In 2021 the firemen 'grabbed me, and grabbed other people.' Everybody got moved. By Tuesday, they'd singled him out, hoisted him under the arms, and run with him while he protested that he could run himself. The story got a rewrite. Trump stories always get a rewrite. They only ever get bigger, and he only ever gets more central. For what it's worth, there really was a collapse scare that week at One Liberty Plaza, the old U.S. Steel Building across from the site. Emergency crews cleared the area. Everyone. That's a crowd being pushed back by first responders doing their jobs, which is what first responders did all week to every gawker, contractor and camera crew in Lower Manhattan. In Trump's telling, he's the guy who predicted the collapse and the guy two heroes chose to save. And the week that story first appeared, in 2021, the 20th anniversary, where was he? Not at Ground Zero. He was in Florida doing pay-per-view commentary for an Evander Holyfield boxing match. Before Tuesday's version, there was Sunday's version, on Fox: 'I went down there very shortly thereafter, 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, but it was just so terrible, so hopeless.' 'We worked long and hard.' Twenty-five years in and it's the first time he's ever put a date on it. Now he's a day-one recovery worker. Remember, this is the same guy who spent 2023 hammering Joe Biden because Biden said he visited the site the day after the attacks when he actually went eight days later. Trump went on Meet the Press and said of Biden, 'He said he was at the World Trade Center and he wasn't.' The gall is the whole personality. Here's everything else. It's long. That's the point. 'I watched those people jump.'Columbus, Ohio, 2015: 'I have a view, a view in my apartment that was specifically aimed at the World Trade Center, and I watched those people jump.' Four miles away. Through smoke. From an apartment he wasn't looking out of, because he was on the phone with a TV station talking about his building. Watched the second plane hit.By 2019, at the anniversary commemoration, he'd added a new detail: he watched the second plane hit from a building. He never mentioned it in his 2001 interview, which is the one time you'd think it would come up. 'Thousands and thousands' of Muslims cheering in Jersey City.Birmingham, Alabama, November 21, 2015. 'I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.' John Farmer was New Jersey's attorney general on 9/11. He ordered an investigation that same day. His words: 'False report. Never happened.' PolitiFact ran every newspaper and TV transcript from September to December 2001 and found nothing. Trump used this lie to justify surveilling mosques, and a few weeks later called for banning Muslims from entering the United States. It's the one lie on this list that got turned into policy. 'I lost hundreds of friends.'South Carolina GOP debate, February 13, 2016. The crowd booed him for blaming Bush, so he pulled out hundreds of dead friends. The next morning on Meet the Press it was 'many, many friends.' He has never named one. Lawrence O'Donnell went looking and reported the number of 9/11 funerals Donald Trump attended: zero. He told that lie once and never again, which for him is the closest thing to a confession. 'I helped a little bit.'April 2016: 'Everyone who helped clear the rubble, and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit.' No contemporaneous account. No photo. No witness. Nothing. 'I was down there also.'July 2019, at the White House, signing the bill to permanently fund care for sick first responders, to their faces: 'I was down there also, but I'm not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you.' Alles was in the room. His response to the Times: 'I spent many months there myself, and I never witnessed him.' The $150,000.After the attacks, the Trump Organization took a $150,000 grant for 40 Wall Street from an Empire State Development program meant to help small businesses recover. In 2016 he told Time it was 'probably a reimbursement' for letting people stay in and store things in the building for months. The New York Daily News pulled the records. The Trump Organization's own application listed the money as being for 'rent loss,' 'cleanup' and 'repair.' Nothing about charity. And in the days after the attack, Trump himself said the building 'wasn't affected by what happened to the World Trade Center.' He took money meant for the bodega guy and later called it philanthropy. The charity that wasn't.His campaign told the Daily Mail in 2015 he'd given '$102m' to hundreds of charities, 'many of which helped people affected by 9/11.' In 2016 the New York City Comptroller audited the two main 9/11 relief funds. 110,000 donors through mid-2002. Donald Trump was not one of them. What's actually documented is a $10,000 pledge to a Howard Stern listener fund. 'Nobody ever heard of Osama bin Laden.'2019: 'Nobody ever heard of Osama bin Laden until really the World Trade Center.' Except, he says, him, because he wrote about bin Laden in his 2000 book and 'nobody listened.' The book mentions bin Laden in passing as one of many threats and does not say to kill him. The CIA had a dedicated bin Laden unit since the mid-90s. Count them. That's a dozen distinct fabrications about a single morning, told across a quarter century, each one placing him closer to the centre of the frame. Here's what's actually happening this week, because the man has spent three days pretending to be a hero and the calendar is about to embarrass him. Friday, the 25th anniversary, all four living former presidents will be at Ground Zero. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden. Hillary Clinton too. They'll stand in silence while family members read 2,977 names, the way it's been done every year. Donald Trump will not be there. He's the only living president who won't be. Why? According to the New York Times, his team had planned the trip and advance staff had already done site visits. Then the Memorial reminded the White House of a rule that's been in place since 2012: nobody makes speeches at Ground Zero. Not mayors, not governors, not presidents. The ceremony belongs to the families. After that, the trip evaporated. Trump's comms guy called the reporting 'fake news.' When a reporter asked Trump directly why he wasn't going, he said, 'Because I'm going to the Pentagon.' That's the whole answer. The Pentagon lets him talk. The Memorial, for its part, put out a statement noting that every living president, including Trump, has attended, and that 'President Trump is always welcome.' Nobody banned him. That's important. Some version of 'Mamdani kept him out' is floating around online and it's nonsense. The Memorial invited him. He chose a podium over a moment of silence, and he's sending JD Vance to stand in the spot where a president belongs. Now look at what his people are doing to the mayor who is showing up. Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor of New York, has attended or scheduled roughly a dozen 9/11 memorial events, mostly at firehouses that lost members. He's going to Ground Zero on Friday, as every New York mayor has for 25 years. Rudy Giuliani went on Newsmax on Sunday, called Mamdani's attendance offensive, compared him to the hijackers, and said Muslims have 'every desire to take us over.' George Pataki, who was governor on 9/11 and just disclosed his own 9/11-related illness, says the mayor should stay home. A petition to keep Mamdani away crossed 100,000 signatures. The Republican running for governor says attendees should turn their backs on him. So the sitting president, who lied about seeing Muslims cheer the attacks, who lied about hundreds of dead friends, who lied about hundreds of workers, who lied about the rubble, who lied about the money, and who told a fresh lie on Tuesday in front of the FDNY, is skipping the ceremony because he can't give a speech. And his oldest ally is on television trying to shame the actual mayor of the actual city out of a ceremony he's actually attending, for the crime of being Muslim. Whose behaviour disrespects the dead here? Do the math. Trump loves math. 2,977 people were murdered that morning. 343 of them were FDNY. Last week the FDNY released its 25-year health report. More than 600 members have died since from illnesses tied to the pile. More than 12,000 have been certified with at least one 9/11-related condition. Nearly 5,000 have cancer. About 26% of those have more than one kind. The department is still losing roughly three members a month. The federal World Trade Center Health Program says more than 9,000 people overall have now died of 9/11 illnesses, which is more than died on the day itself. Those are the people who actually 'worked long and hard.' Those are the ones who actually got carried out. Some of them are still being carried out, 25 years later, in coffins, three a month. Donald Trump has never produced one name of a friend he lost, one worker he sent, one funeral he attended, one dollar he gave when it mattered. What he has produced is a story about two big firemen who picked him up like he was the thing worth saving that day. He wasn't there. He was four miles away, on the phone, measuring buildings. Friday he'll be 230 miles away, at a microphone. The firefighters who are actually big and strong will be at Ground Zero, standing behind a mayor their former mayor is trying to run out of town, reading names into the silence that Donald Trump can't stand to be part of because nobody's allowed to hear him talk. That's the whole story. It always was. There is no more disgusting, amoral, indecent, lying piece of shit on this planet. I'm sorry, Amercia. I truly am. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.