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‘Carried by firefighters’: A Trump 9/11 terror attack claim. Then a fact-check
Donald Trump is facing backlash over unverified claims that firefighters carried him near Ground Zero after 9/11 and that he was directly involved in the rescue operations. The White House has defende
FULL ARTICLE · The Indian Express World
7 min readUpdated: Sep 9, 2026 11:57 AM IST
Donald Trump in an undated NBC interview (left) after the 9/11 attacks (AP Photo).
US President Donald Trump has landed in the middle of another controversy over his claims that he was pulled out of the danger zone around the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and that he worked for days on Ground Zero. He has often repeated the claims without any proof. For this, he has always been criticised. This time, he has been fact-checked by multiple news outlets.
On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four planes, crashing two into New York’s World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon, while the fourth went down in Pennsylvania.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed, and thousands more later suffered illnesses linked to toxic dust and debris from the attacks.
ALSO READ | New York records show officials knew Ground Zero air was toxic after 9/11; Mamdani says leaders ‘lied’
What is Trump’s claim?
While addressing an event honouring the first responders after the 9/11 attacks, Trump said he was carried away fromby firefighters from near One Liberty Plaza. “Two fireman, big strong guys, they grabbed me under the arms — ‘you’ve got to get out of here!’ — and they literally lifted me up, and they started running with me,” he said. “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,” he added.
As per the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, during the attack, it was initially feared that the One Liberty Plaza (formerly called the US Steel Building). One Liberty Plaza is located directly across the street from the World Trade Center site.
Trump claims he was basically lifted out of the rubble on 9/11: “Two fireman, big strong guys, they grabbed me under the arms — ‘got to get our of here!’ — and they literally lifted me up, and they started running with me.” pic.twitter.com/63k48q7o4d — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 8, 2026
News outlets dismiss Trump’s claim
According to CNN, the claim was “misleading”. “He was miles away from the World Trade Center on 9/11 and was not whisked out of any building near Ground Zero that day,” the news website reported. Washington Post called the claim “disputed”.
PBS reported that Trump was filed doing multiple interviews near Ground Zero on September 13. He said in the interviews that he had brought along with him construction workers to help in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack. This was the earliest recorded evidence of Trump being near the plane crash site.
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He claimed in multiple interviews that he had got around 100 men from his company and that he was on site to motivate them.
🚨 JUST IN: President Trump posts this major moment when he witnessed 9/11’s Ground Zero following the Islamic attack High intensity, high energy, on alert, wanting to help his country 🇺🇸 “There’s never been anything like this. It’s disgraceful. And I hope we attack fast. I… pic.twitter.com/ncnAnKIdzu — Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 7, 2026
However, when independent fact-checker Poynter’s PolitiFact spoke to the personnel who were on the ground, Trump’s claims seemed to fall flat. PolitiFact quoted Richard Alles, chief of an NYC Fire Department battalion managing the rescue operations, as saying in 2019 that he didn’t have any record that backed Trump’s claim of being at Ground Zero, or his commissioning of 100 workers. “I spent many months there myself, and I never witnessed him,” Alles was quoted as saying by New York Times.
This directly contrasted his claim of: “Many of those affected were firefighters, police officers and other first responders. And 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.”
🚨 JUST NOW: President Trump is dropping VIDEO PROOF for every Fake News outlet lying to millions that he was nowhere near Ground Zero after 9/11 They want to memory-hole this footage. Donald Trump: “Well, I just went to what they call Ground Zero. I’ve never seen anything like… pic.twitter.com/FH5qt9qcsD — Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 9, 2026
New York Times, too, challenged his claims and called them “exaggerated”. “By the time Mr. Trump hit the campaign trail in 2015, those initial stories had evolved into a mishmash of unproven claims: At a rally, he said he had watched people jump with his own eyes — possibly through a “solid gold” telescope — at Trump Tower. That claim is unproven, and Trump Tower is about four miles from the World Trade Center site. He also shared another widely debunked claim that Muslims in New Jersey were celebrating after the planes hit,” the news website reported.
White House responds to ‘proof’ demand
According to CNN, the White House responded to a demand for “proof” of the President’s statement, saying there was no documentation of the incident. An unsigned email from the administration was quoted as: “He was a private citizen at the time, not everything he did was documented.”
Later, the White House sought to dismiss the “fact-checks” in the media about the claim, saying Americans didn’t trust the media. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle was quoted as saying: “President Trump spent the morning paying tribute to the heroic first responders who laid down their lives in service to others in the September 11 attacks and honoring 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.”
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Trump says was on site ‘as soon as law allowed’
Responding to the media outlets’ claims, Trump doubled down on his claim and called the fact-checks “fake news” and “made-up”. He said: “Well, I don’t think I would be the first thing on anyone’s mind but, I was there, obviously not on the same day as the collapse, but shortly thereafter, with a large group of Construction Workers [sic].”
“…Again, check out the clips of me at the World Trade Center site. I was there as soon as the Law allowed [sic],” he added.
He also shared videos of his interviews from the time. However, non of them could be verified as being shot on September 9, 2001.
He said the media outlets are “angry, and sick, over the fact that I won the Presidential Election three times”.
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