'Stolen Valor': Trump's 9/11 Story Draws Scorn As Fabrication

Trump said he saw the attacks happen from his office in Trump Tower, about four miles away from the World Trade Center. In an interview with WWOR-TV that day, he infamously boasted (incorrectly ) that he now had the tallest building in downtown Manhattan after the collapse of the World Trade Center.

While Trump himself was documented on September 13 to have been a few blocks from ground zero and said he'd visited the site, his claim to have sent over 100 of his construction workers in the immediate aftermath of the attack and to have“helped a little” himself has been disputed.

In 2019, Richard Alles, a New York City Fire Department battalion chief on the day of the attack, who said he was on the scene about 20 minutes after the second tower collapsed, told PolitiFact that he had no knowledge of Trump sending a crew of men to help with the wreckage.

“I was there for several months-I have no knowledge of his being down there,” Alles said, adding that if Trump had sent a crew of 100 workers,“there would be a record of it. Everybody worked under the direct supervision of the police and fire department and the joint commander for emergency services. Is there a chance he was ever down there by himself and I didn't know it? It's possible, but I know of no one who ever witnessed him there.”

Other outlets, including The Associated Press and The Washington Post, said they contacted Trump's 2016 campaign to ask for details about his activity following the attacks, but received no response.

Neither of the two firefighters who supposedly carried Trump to safety has ever publicly come forward to discuss their run-in with the famous New York developer, and Trump did not mention the incident during interviews at the time.

Trump has a history of lies surrounding 9/11, including that he saw “thousands” of Muslims“cheering” in Jersey City as the towers fell and that he personally “predicted” the attacks in one of his books.

He has also been found to have misled the public about his philanthropy related to the tragedy: In 2001, he pledged to donate $10,000 to a recovery fund for victims and first responders, which the city comptroller's office ultimately found was never delivered. More than 15 years later, his foundation gave $100,000 to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.

His business empire also received $150,000 from a post-9/11 recovery program meant for businesses affected by the attacks, which Trump has claimed was reimbursement for allowing victims to use his building at 40 Wall Street to take shelter. But the application made no mention of shelter and instead stated that the request was for compensation for lost rent, cleanup, and repairs following the attacks, according to a 2016 investigation by the New York Daily News.

Journalist Ron Filipkowski described Trump's tale about the firefighters as yet another instance of what he's called “stolen valor,” but was astonished by its specificity.