Our president is a liar. I’m sure you are aware of this, but I want to examine the lies he’s told about his personal experience on 9/11. I used Gemini AI to help me with this. I asked for a timeline of Trump’s day on September 11, 2001, and then I verified it from other sources.
In particular, I want to assess the claim he just made that he was rescued from the burning Twin Towers that day: "We thought the towers were coming down on top of us and two fireman, big strong guys, they grabbed me under the arms -- 'got to get out of here!' -- and they literally lifted me up, and they started running with me."
The timeline is constructed mainly through contemporaneous comments made by Trump himself, although even these comments include lies.
8:00 AM – 8:45 AM: Trump was in his penthouse residence at Trump Tower on 5th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, preparing for his day and meeting with a group of business associates.
8:46 AM: American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower (1 WTC). The resulting explosion and fire were visible from Trump’s penthouse windows. They turned on the television and initial broadcast reports speculated it may have been a small plane or a boiler explosion.
9:03 AM: United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower (2 WTC). In the afternoon, Trump will recall looking directly out his windows and watching the second plane collide with the tower.
9:59 AM & 10:28 AM: The South and North Towers collapsed. In the afternoon, Trump will recall watching the collapses unfold from his windows.
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM: Trump called into a live broadcast on local New York TV station WWOR-TV (Channel 9) to offer his commentary on the tragedy. He recalled his morning: "I have a window that looks directly at the World Trade Center, and I saw this huge explosion. I was with a group of people. I really couldn't even believe it. And then, obviously, the second plane went into the other tower. It was an amazing—and terrible—sight." Trump also falsely boasted in this interview that he now owned the tallest property (40 Wall Street) in Lower Manhattan.
Late Afternoon / Evening: Trump remained at Trump Tower, making phone calls to family, business partners, and media figures to assess the status of his various properties in Financial District zones and monitor the ongoing citywide emergency response.
Trump began lying about 9/11 almost immediately. On Trump September 13, 2001, he stated on televised interviews with both NBC News and a German news outlet that he had sent over more than a hundred workers from his construction teams to assist in the rescue and cleanup effort. There are no official city records or emergency service logs that confirm this ever happened. That is because it did not.
He repeated this lie during his campaign for president in 2015 and 2016, and during his first presidency. In 2019, he held a ceremony with 9/11 first responders in the White House Rose Garden and falsely stated that “I was down there [at Ground Zero] also” and “helped a little bit” clearing debris. He wasn’t there that day, or in the days afterward, helping in any way.
Now he has taken the lie to another level, claiming that he was actually rescued by first responders on 9/11. If that were true, he might have thanked them during the 2019 Rose Garden ceremony. He made no mention of it. This is because it never happened.
In this case, his own previous public testimony is the strongest evidence against him. By his own telling, he was in Trump Tower when the planes hit the World Trade Center, and he remained there throughout the day, making calls. If he had been physically at the World Trade Center when the planes hit, he would have said so when interviewed on Channel 9 in the 1pm hour.
This lie is particularly grotesque for a couple of reasons. First, it disrespects the people who died that day and the first responders who actually did help and thereafter suffered severe health repercussions from breathing the toxic air.
Second, it is a lie so easily refuted, including from his own prior accounts, that he had to know it wouldn’t stand the least scrutiny, and yet he said it anyway. Why?
A team of psychologists could be assembled to attempt a full explanation. But part of the explanation is that he’s been telling these kinds of lies his whole life and if he’s paid any penalty for them, it hasn’t prevented him from being twice elected president.
There’s a saying, sometimes attributed to Abraham Lincoln and sometimes attributed to P.T. Barnum: "You can fool some of the people all the time and all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time."
Trump appears to only care about the first two clauses of that saying. And he definitely does not care that many of the people that he fools in the moment will later discover that they were deceived. Will they think less of him?
Yes, but he could not care any less.
That’s a massive character flaw. He seems to live by the creed of another saying that is often attributed to P.T. Barnum: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
When he was younger, I gave Trump credit for knowing the game he plays. It was aptly described by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf:
…in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.
In that passage, Hitler was accusing Jews of spreading a lie that General Erich Ludendorff, a supporter of Hitler’s, was responsible for Germany’s defeat in The Great War. But it aptly described the techniques he and his minister of propaganda Josef Goebbels would use to gain and maintain power.
The technique can be effective if the practitioners know the actual truth in order to expertly distort it. But, as Trump has aged, I’ve begun to sense that he’s muddled in his own mind about what is true and what is false. It seems he’s often become a victim of his own propaganda. Perhaps repeating so many lies has affected “the deeper strata of his emotional nature” in such a way that he now believes much of his own bullshit.
This is more credible because he gives every appearance of being a very gullible man himself, prone to believing outrageous and absurd things he reads online. To some degree, he’s always shown this tendency, but it has gotten worse.
This makes him less effective as the teller of Big Lies. This 9/11 lie is a good example. It’s possible he no longer knows where he was that morning because he can no longer distinguish the truth from his own propaganda. He victimized others for so long and so effectively, that he may have wound up victimizing himself.
I’ve always maintained that, it’s a feature of Trump’s pathology, that he literally can’t distinguish truth from lies. As a first responder, I had lots of conversations with schizophrenics, and Trump’s disconnection from reality reminds me very much of schizophrenia.
This contemporaneous account shows that Trump did wander about near ground zero a day or so after the attack. As always, he was vague responding to questions about what he was doing there, but eager to be noticed. Leopards don’t change their spots.