Trump claims firefighters carried him to safety on 9/11: What actually happened

President Donald Trump has repeatedly made claims over the years about what he saw, did and experienced during and after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. As the 25th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, he offered another account on Tuesday while honouring first responders at the White House. Trump said he had taken workers from his organization to the World Trade Center site after the attacks and described a moment when two firefighters allegedly carried him away because they feared a nearby building was about to collapse.

The account may contain elements of events that occurred in the chaotic days following the attacks. However, Trump has not provided evidence establishing that the specific incident involving the firefighters occurred as he described it. Some elements of his account are also misleading. Trump was at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan when the attacks occurred, several miles from the World Trade Center. There is no public evidence showing that he was inside the building he identified as the ‘US Steel building’ when firefighters allegedly carried him away.

The White House did not provide evidence or additional details when asked to substantiate Trump's account. An unsigned Tuesday email from the White House said, “He was a private citizen at the time, not everything he did was documented.” Later on Tuesday, spokesperson Davis Ingle criticised media coverage of Trump's remarks.

“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 honouring 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.

Here is what Trump said and what the available evidence shows.

What Trump said

Speaking at the White House, Trump described his involvement in the aftermath of the attacks and said he brought workers to the site. “For nine months, rescue and recovery crews worked day and night on the site. I want to just thank my people; I took a lot of my me(n), I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened,” he said. “And they were, they had no hesitation, everybody went down with me. We went down, it was a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest, it was, you know, it was raw, and nobody’s seen anything like it, ever. We had other buildings; the United States Steel building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down; the truth is it creaked a lot, it creaked. It still creaks. But it never came down, and I re(member), 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, said, ‘Gotta 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. US Steel.” The statement raises several questions about when and where the alleged incident occurred.

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Trump was not near the World Trade Center when the attacks started

Trump did not specify precisely when the firefighters allegedly carried him away. However, his description that he went to Ground Zero ‘right after this happened’ could leave the impression that the incident occurred on September 11. Available accounts establish that Trump was at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan when the attacks took place. He was therefore several miles from the World Trade Center at the time of the attacks.

A former Trump Organization executive told Politico in 2016 that Trump did not do much out of the ordinary that day. Trump's own previous version of the firefighter story provides additional context. In 2016, he said the alleged incident happened a couple of days after the attacks rather than on the day itself. That distinction matters because it places the claim in the period after the initial attacks, when evacuations and fears about damaged buildings were occurring around Lower Manhattan.

No public evidence places Trump inside the ‘US Steel building’

Trump referred to a building he called the ‘United States Steel building’, saying it was ‘creaking’ and that people feared it could collapse. The building is better known as One Liberty Plaza. In 2001, it was located immediately across from the World Trade Center complex. There is no public evidence establishing that Trump was inside One Liberty Plaza during the alleged incident with the firefighters. Two days after the attacks, Trump was interviewed outdoors in the general vicinity of Ground Zero. Trump's 2016 account also differed in an important way from Tuesday's wording. At that time, he said the building that appeared to be in danger of collapsing was "not so far from us," indicating that he was not necessarily inside the building itself.

Watch what Trump said here

There were genuine fears about One Liberty Plaza

The absence of evidence supporting Trump's specific account does not mean that concerns about One Liberty Plaza were fabricated. In the days following the attacks, there were fears that the building could collapse. Building officials said it was structurally sound, but rescue workers and journalists were evacuated from the building on September 12, 2001, amid concerns.

The Washington Post also reported that rescue workers were rushed away from the building again on September 14. Trump himself described the atmosphere around Ground Zero during an NBC interview on September 13, 2001. “Every few minutes, a whistle would go off and everybody would just run, because you have all the buildings around it, which are in such a weakened state that people just don’t know. And so they just have to take off, and then they come back, and they’re working under 50-story buildings that you don’t know if they’re going to fall down. So it’s a terrible thing for the workers and it’s a terrible thing for the world, really.”

That account demonstrates that people working around Ground Zero faced genuine uncertainty and periodic evacuations. It is therefore possible that Trump experienced or witnessed one of those moments of panic. But there is no public evidence establishing that firefighters physically lifted him and ran with him as he described Tuesday. Trump also did not tell NBC during the September 13 interview that he himself had been carried away by firefighters.

No public evidence confirms Trump's claimed rescue crew

Trump's Tuesday remarks also referenced taking "the whole crew" to Ground Zero after the attacks. He did not explicitly say Tuesday that the workers participated in clearing rubble or carrying out rescue operations. However, Trump has made broader claims in previous years about sending workers to Ground Zero and helping with the recovery effort. He has not publicly produced evidence establishing those claims, including his previous assertion that he had sent a group of roughly 100 workers to the site.

Richard Alles, a retired New York Fire Department official who was a battalion chief on 9/11, said in 2019 that he did not recall seeing Trump at the site during the recovery operation. “I spent many months there myself, and I never witnessed him,” Richard Alles, a retired New York Fire Department official who was a battalion chief on 9/11 and who attended a Trump White House event in 2019, told The New York Times in 2019. Alles also told PolitiFact in 2019 that a group of 100 workers would have generated records because people working at the site were operating under the supervision of emergency authorities.

There were contemporary reports of Trump interacting with police officers and volunteers near the World Trade Center site. The Associated Press reported in 2016 that news accounts from the days after 9/11 included references to Trump giving high-fives to police officers and volunteers heading toward the World Trade Center. Those reports, however, do not establish Trump's broader claims about organizing or deploying a large rescue and recovery crew.

What about Trump's claim that the building "still creaks"?

Trump also said the building ‘still creaks’. There is no public evidence supporting that claim. One Liberty Plaza reopened in October 2001, less than two months after the attacks. The building has continued operating as an office property. The fact that the building survived the attacks and reopened does not establish that it "still creaks" in the manner Trump described.

So what is the truth?

Unsubstantiated and misleading. Trump's latest story contains elements that are consistent with the documented chaos and evacuation fears around Lower Manhattan in the days following 9/11. There were genuine concerns about damaged buildings, including One Liberty Plaza, and workers at Ground Zero were periodically evacuated.

However, there is no public evidence confirming Trump's specific claim that two firefighters physically lifted him under the arms and carried him away because they believed a building was about to collapse. Trump was also not at the World Trade Center when the attacks occurred, and his own earlier account placed the alleged firefighter incident several days after September 11.

Likewise, there is no publicly available evidence establishing his broader claims that he organized a large crew to participate in rescue and recovery operations at Ground Zero. The available record therefore supports the existence of a dangerous and uncertain environment around Ground Zero, but it does not substantiate the specific details of Trump's latest account.