On September 8, 2026, at a White House event honoring 9/11 first responders and days before the 25th anniversary of the attacks, Trump told a story about being rescued by firefighters at Ground Zero.
His account, in full: “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. 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.”
CNN's Daniel Dale examined the claim. Several parts do not hold up, and one part might.
By saying he went down “right after this happened,” Trump left the impression he was at Ground Zero on the day. He was not. He was miles away at Trump Tower in Midtown when the attack occurred, and a former Trump Organization executive told Politico in 2016 that he did not do much out of the ordinary that day. In a 2016 version of this same story Trump placed the firemen episode “a couple of days” after the attack, and in a Truth Social post the night of September 8 he wrote that he “was there, obviously not on the same day as the collapse, but shortly thereafter.”
The building he means is One Liberty Plaza, long known as the U.S. Steel Building. There is no public evidence he was inside it. In his 2016 telling he said the building that seemed about to collapse was “not so far from us,” which places him outside it.
The part that could be true: there was real and repeated panic about One Liberty Plaza. CNN reported that rescue workers and journalists were evacuated from it on September 12, 2001, and the Washington Post reported workers were rushed away again on September 14. Trump himself described that phenomenon to NBC on September 13, 2001: “Every few minutes, a whistle would go off and everybody would just run.” He did not say then that he was among those running. It is possible he was swept up in one of those moments. There is no proof, and he has offered none.
On the crew, he has gone further in the past, claiming he sent a group of workers to help at the site, once numbering it at 100. Richard Alles, a retired FDNY battalion chief who was on duty on 9/11 and attended a Trump White House event in 2019, told The New York Times, “I spent many months there myself, and I never witnessed him.” Alles told PolitiFact that if Trump had sent 100 workers, “there would be a record of it. Everybody worked under direct supervision of the police and fire department and the joint commander for emergency services.” The Associated Press reported in 2016 that news accounts from the days after 9/11 do place Trump at the scene giving high-fives to police officers and volunteers heading to the site.
One detail has no basis at all. Trump said of One Liberty Plaza, “It still creaks.” The building reopened in October 2001, less than two months after the attacks, and functions normally.
Asked for evidence, the White House provided none. It said in an unsigned email, “He was a private citizen at the time, not everything he did was documented.” Spokesperson Davis Ingle said Trump “was relaying his experience of a city reeling immediately after and in the days and weeks after the horrific attacks,” and called the coverage “a disgrace.” Trump posted that night that “everything I said was exactly accurate.” The following day he revised the timeline again, clarifying that the episode did not happen on September 11 itself.
This is a repeat pattern rather than a single slip (see Trump, 79, Falsely Claims He Predicted the 9/11 Attacks; His Own Book Proves Otherwise).
The event was attended by more than 100 first responders. Richard Alles, the retired FDNY battalion chief, put it to Common Dreams more bluntly: “I was there for several months. I have no knowledge of his being down there.” Journalist Ron Filipkowski called the account “stolen valor,” writing that Trump had “created a fictitious event featuring himself, who did nothing, as the hero.” Neither of the two firefighters Trump described has ever come forward, and when the Associated Press and the Washington Post asked his 2016 campaign for details, none were provided.
Two other things happened at that event, and one of them belongs on the credit side of the ledger.
Trump used the ceremony to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, posthumously, to Welles Crowther, the 24-year-old equities trader and volunteer firefighter known as “the man in the red bandana,” who is credited with saving at least 18 people in the South Tower before he was killed when it came down. Trump described the rescue at length and presented the medal to Crowther's mother Alison and sister Paige.
In the middle of that description he added this: “They call him the man in the red bandana. Have you heard that term? The man in the red bandana has become more famous than me. I don't like it. Very unhappy, but he's become much more famous than me.” Mediaite and other outlets reported the line as a quip. HuffPost reported the reaction, which was not amused; critics said he could not let an event honoring someone else stay about that person.
That night Trump answered the fact checks in a 476-word Truth Social post insisting his own account was accurate.
Snopes examined the rescue claim and reached the same place this entry does, from the other direction. It found no evidence supporting the claim that firefighters carried him from One Liberty Plaza, noted that television interviews do place him in the vicinity in the days afterward, and said the White House did not answer its question about who the firefighters were. Rather than call it false, Snopes left the claim unrated, saying it remains unproven until more information emerges (see Trump Appears to Doze at the Pentagon's 25th Anniversary 9/11 Ceremony as the Names of the Dead Are Read).