Trump’s Top 10 9/11 Lies

Your mileage may vary, of course, and ours may too, for that matter. But for now, here’s how we rank them.

Until retreating to Florida in the face of criminal prosecution, Donald Trump was a lifelong New Yorker, and no event shook the city more than the 9/11 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. So it’s no surprise that Trump—a pathological liar who loves to be the center of attention—has told a lot of lies about 9/11 and his imaginary involvement with it.

Most of them are repetitions, variations or elaborations of past lies, so a surprisingly small number stand out as the most consequential, whether because of when and where they were told, or because of their significance. The list we’re compiled can’t be considered definitive—especially with regard to order. Journalism, after all, is only the first draft of history. But after a quarter century of Trump’s lies on the subject, it’s a necessary step toward historical honesty. So, here in ascending order is our list of Trump’s Top Ten 9/11 lies:

Lie #10: Trump’s false claim that “Nobody ever heard of Osama bin Laden” before 9/11… except him, of course!

Trump has a habit of saying, “Nobody ever hears of” something when it’s something he’s just heard of for the first time, or something that’s just made the news, so this lie is sort of automatic for Trump. He’s told a bit differently multiple times. One example was a 2019 press briefing announcing the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State. At the time he said: “Nobody ever heard of Osama bin Laden until really the World Trade Center.”

An AP fact-check at the time almost nailed it:

THE FACTS: That’s incorrect. Bin Laden was well known by the CIA, other national security operations, experts and the public long before 9/11, with the CIA having a unit entirely dedicated to bin Laden going back to the mid-1990s.

We say “almost nailed it” because it’s not incorrect. It’s a lie. A gateway lie to all the rest.

Lie #9: Trump’s false claim that he warned of 9/11, but was ignored.

At that same briefing, Trump trotted out another, related lie that he revisits from time to time, claiming to have warned about bin Laden only to be ignored in his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” a book that his ghostwriter has referred to as his “first book of fiction.” Here’s AP’s account of what Trump said:

“I’m writing a book … About a year before the World Trade Center came down, the book came out. I was talking about Osama bin Laden. I said, ‘You have to kill him. You have to take him out.’ Nobody listened to me.” Trump added that people said to him, ”‘You predicted that Osama Bin Laden had to be killed, before he knocked down the World Trade Center.’ It’s true.”

But as AP noted the book “makes a passing mention of bin Laden but did no more than point to the al-Qaida leader as one of many threats to U.S. security. Nor does he say in the book that bin Laden should have be killed.”

So Trump and his ghostwriter were no more prescient than anybody else.

Lie #8: Trump’s false claim that he watched people jump from the Twin Towers from his Trump Towers apartment.

Trump has told a whole series of lies in different forms to connect himself with 9/11. (Almost all the rest of the lies on this list.) It begins with his claim to be a dramatic eyewitness. One instance was at a 2015 rally in Columbus, Ohio, when he said “I have a view—a view in my apartment that was specifically aimed at the World Trade Center,” adding, “and I watched those people jump.”

But Trump Tower was four miles from the Twin Towers, which were enveloped in smoke at the time. Perhaps Superman could have seen people jumping through the smoke from that distance, but not Donald Trump.

Lie #7: Trump’s false claim that he helped the clean-up effort by providing space in his somewhat nearby building.

This was one of a cluster of lies Trump, his campaign, and surrogates, such as Rudi Guiliani, promoted especially hard during the 2016 campaign, coupled with derogatory lies about Hilary Clinton. Some were more significant then, others have endured more significantly.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Trump collected a $150,00 grant for 40 Wall Street, from a state recovery program meant to help small businesses after 9/11.

In April 2016, he told Time Magazine, “It was probably a reimbursement for the fact that I allowed people, for many months, to stay in the building (40 Wall St.), use the building and store things in the building,” a claim he made repeatedly according to the NY Daily News, which reported that October that “Trump’s campaign refused to respond to multiple requests for more information about his vague claims made to Time.

So, (a) there’s no evidence Trump provided help, (b) the Daily News also reported, “That government program was designed to help local businesses get back on their feet — not reimburse people for their charitable work,” and (c) they also reported that Trump’s company was one of dozens of large business who got money under the state-run program that wouldn’t have qualified as eligible small businesses under guidelines from the federal government, which supplied the funds. In fact, Trump elsewhere said his property “wasn’t affected by what happened to the World Trade Center” in the days after the attacks.

Lie #6: Trump’s false claim that he contributed to 9/11 charities.

Another way Trump has lied about helping out in the aftermath of 9/11 is with false claims of charitable giving, which was heavily amplified during the 2016 campaign by former NYC mayor Rudy Guiliani. Most prominently, he pledged a $10,000 donation to Howard Stern in late September, 2001, and was thanked on air on Oct 10, 2001 by co-host Robin Quivers, saying, “He gave us $10,000, that was beautiful,” and Stern replied, “Yes he did, to our fund.”

But during the 2016 campaign, Trump’s history of false promises and dodgey finances with charities became a major story, and the NY Daily News focused attention on this claim, resulting in an October announcement by the city comptroller that there was no record of Trump giving to either of the two main 9/11 charities at least through the middle of 2002, when the need was most. His audit found 110,000 givers, but Trump was not one of them. Nor did any other search turn up later giving by him, until months after he launched his presidential campaign, and even then it came from the Trump foundation, which was filled with other people’s money, not Trump’s.

All this was despite a campaign spokeswoman telling the Daily Mail in 2015 that Trump had given “a total of $102m” to “hundreds of charitable foundations over a relatively short period of time, many of which helped people affected by 9/11.” No evidence of this was ever provided, despite repeated media requests.

Lie #5: Trump’s false claim that he sent 100s of employees to help clean up and recovery efforts after 9/11.

Two days after 9/11, Trump falsely told NBC News, “I have hundreds of men inside working right now, and we’re bringing down another 125 in a little while.” He cited at least two different figures that same day. He told a German TV station, “I have a lot of men down here right now. We have over 100 and we have about 125 coming. So, we’ll have a couple hundred people down here.” And he told a media scrum “I’ve got a hundred men working down here,” with “another 100 in a little while,” adding that “a couple of them got hurt.” None of the figures he gave were consistent, and all of them were false.

Richard Alles, a New York City Fire Department battalion chief on Sept. 11, 2001, told PolitiFact in 2019 he had no knowledge of Trump or his employees being at the site. “I was there for several months — I have no knowledge of his being down there,” Ailes said. As for the 100-man crew, “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.” Multiple media organizations have tried to confirm Trump’s claims over the years, but there’s no evidence to support his conflicting claims. If Trump had proof, he’d surely have produced it by now. He hasn’t, because there is none.

What’s more, Tim O’Brien, author of “TrumpNation,” told the New York Times in 2019 that the size of the Trump Organization at the time was “a little bit over a dozen people.” So it would have been impossible to send a hundred, much less “hundreds of people” to help in relief efforts. “He’s very comfortable propagandizing that event for political purposes,” O’Brien told the Times. “Even in the face of tragedy, he can’t help but self-promote and self-aggrandize.”

Lie #4: Trump’s false claim that he personally went to ground zero after 9/11 to help rescue survivors.

But it wasn’t just his people—hundreds of imaginary employees—who Trump said helped out after 9/11. He also told the added lie that he himself went down to ground zero to help. This lie is one Trump has told many times in different ways, but perhaps the most noteworthy was in July 2019, when he signed a bill to permanently fund the care of emergency workers who became ill after 9/11. As he did so, Trump falsely claimed to have spent a lot of time with them:

“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.”

Retired deputy chief Richard Alles refuted this claim as well. “I spent many months there myself, and I never witnessed him,” Alles told the Times. “He was a private citizen at the time. I don’t know what kind of role he could have possibly played.” But—typically—the Times dishonestly didn’t report it as a lie, instead saying, “This is exaggerated,” which itself is a lie.

Lie #3” Trump’s false claim that he saw 1000s of Muslims in NJ celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers. Trump isn’t the only one to have told this lie, and it’s not a lie primarily about him—he only claims to have seen it himself. But he is without doubt the most influential superspreader of this lie. After initially uncritically reporting on this lie in its campaig coverage in Nov 2015, the New York Times followed up with a solid debunking. though that hardly stopped Trump from repeating it. In an Alabama campaign rally he said: “Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.”

Following that, the Time noted, “Reporters were unable to find any evidence for his story, but Mr. Trump stuck with it in a television interview on Sunday. ‘It did happen,’ he said. ‘I saw it. It was on television.’”

But it wasn’t. It was all a lie. The Times quoted John Farmer Jr., New Jersey’s attorney general on 9/11, who “ordered an investigation that very day and found the reports to be bogus,” they explained.

“We followed up on that report instantly because of its implications,” Farmer told them. “The word came back quickly from Jersey City, later from Paterson. False report. Never happened.”

Lie #2: Trump’s false claim that he owned the tallest building in downtown Manhattan after the Twin Towers fell.

This was Trump’s very first 9/11 lie, first told as the tragedy was unfolding. Trump went on local TV, WWOR, and falsely claimed that he now owned the tallest building in lower Manhattan. Specifically, Trump said:

“40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest—and then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest. And now it’s the tallest.”

What he said was true of another building, 70 Pine St., which is 25 feet taller than Trump’s building.

From one point of view—especially compared to the vile racism of lie #3—its a trivial lie. And it would be. If he had told it at any other time. But he told it as virtually everyone else in America was feeling shock, grief, or fear. He felt none of that. He felt nothing connected to anyone else in America. He felt pride. Based on a lie.

Trump’s lie-based sense of personal triumph, while the rest of America felt shared loss and grief, put him deeply at odds with the whole of America in almost the same way as his lie about Muslims celebrating tried to paint them.

Lie #1: Trump falsely claimed he lost hundreds of friends on 9/11. This is a rare lie that Trump only told once—but he told it at a very crucial time. It was in the 2016 GOP primary debate in South Carolina, when he was leading the GOP field in national polls, but had only won one of the first two primary contests. He had no government or foreign policy experience, and this lie was key part of establishing his identity and credibility as speaking for the American people as a whole. Losing hundreds of friends on 9/11. What more could you want?

This is Trump’s worst 9/11 lie, because, as Lawrence O’Donnell explained on his 2018 9/11 broadcast, he was stealing the grief of the victims to make it his own and use it as weapon against his political rivals, when he himself is incapable of feeling grief.

“As soon as he said that… I said that he was lying [on Twitter]” O’Donnell said. And “The next day on Meet the Press, Donald Trump changed that answer to ‘many, many friends’… and once again I immediately tweeted that that was a lie.” At the time, O’Donnell said, he didn’t know what the number was, “but knowing the way Trump lies as I do, I suspected then that the real number was zero. And then I checked and the number was zero. Donald Trump did not attend a single 9/11 funeral. Not one.”

What’s more, he said, “When I held that lie up to Donald Trump’s face, even he could see how evil that lie was, and even Donald Trump knew he could not try to tell that lie again.”

Once was enough, however. It was the greatest of all his lies falsely placing himself at the center of 9/11, and he told it in the moment he needed it most. Because it worked, he was able to superspread all his other 9/11 lies, and thousands other lies as well.