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When it comes to 9/11, Donald Trump has always had a problem with the truth. Now that he’s increasingly detached from reality and completely surrounded by sycophants, his lies have gotten downright bizarre.
The absolute weirdest of these has to be Trump’s fantasy that he was literally pulled to safety by brave firefighters as he stood … Inside? Near? Under? … the US Steel Building, now One Liberty Plaza.
There was significant fear that the US Steel Building might collapse, fear that turned out to be wrong. But on both September 12, 2001, and September 14, 2001, rescue workers were evacuated and rushed from the building.
Which, apparently, is where Trump comes in:
“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’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 arm, said, ‘Got to 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.”
To hear Trump tell it, he’s also some sort of air traffic savant, heavily implying that as he watched the second plane on 9/11, he knew it was going to hit the Twin Towers:
“I saw the second plane hit and you saw that come and you’re watching it and it’s because I watched the air patterns for years and you know where the planes are. They go up right up the Hudson River. This thing was coming right into the second building and I said, ‘Wow.” So I watched that happen and I said, “Wow, we are now in a different time.”
Wow. Wow, we are now in a different time. What soaring and stirring rhetoric, right?
There’s another big problem with this make-believe, which is that Trump Tower is some four miles away from Ground Zero, so the chance Trump was keenly watching the air patterns over the Twin Towers is pretty much zero.
With Trump, it’s always tempting to try to determine whether he knows he’s lying or believes his own lies. Before his second term, that approach still made some sort of sense, because his lies were at least reality-shaped, more about puffery than outright fantasy.
But you could see the outlines of full fabulism starting to ramp up.
“I spent a lot of time down there with you”
Two days after September 11, Trump did an interview with a German television station — because of course he was not going to pass up a media hit — saying, “We have over 100 and we have about 125 coming. So we’ll have a couple hundred people down here. And they are very brave and what they’re doing is amazing. And we will be involved in some form in helping to reconstruct.”
But by later that day, when talking to NBC, it was now “hundreds of men working inside right now” with more on the way, and “they’ve never seen bodies like this before, bodies all over.”
You are probably not going to be surprised to learn that no one can verify that Trump sent hundreds of workers to Ground Zero to help clean up.
By the 2016 election, Trump was saying he personally helped clear rubble at the site, a claim which is as easily disproved as it is ridiculous.
Does anyone really think that Donald Trump, of all people, would have lifted a finger without having a full camera crew document it all for posterity? And does anyone really think that Donald Trump, of all people, did the grim, grueling work of clearing away steel and cement, all the while breathing in toxins?
And by his first term, Trump wasn’t just at Ground Zero. He was there for a long time, as he explained with some absurd faux modesty: “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.”
There is, of course, no evidence showing Trump spent any meaningful amount of time at the site.
Trump has always inflated his role in 9/11, but these days, he’s living in a fantasyland, one that he makes and remakes daily, where he’s always the star of the show.
Alert the media: the truth is knowable
The mainstream media, is, unsurprisingly, not covering itself in glory as it struggles to avoid saying that either the president’s brain has completely left the station or that he’s a mendacious liar who knows no bounds, or both.
So the Washington Post went with saying that Trump was repeating his “disputed account of his role in recovery.” The New York Times went with calling this slop “a series of questionable and provocative statements to burnish his political brand.”
It is indeed provocative, though probably not in the way the New York Times meant, for the president of the United States to either be lying about his role responding to the deadliest attack on American soil or be so addled that he thinks he genuinely was down there pulling away chunks of cement and narrowly escaping death from a tumbling building which then never actually tumbled.
Also not covering themselves in glory? Trump sycophants. Here’s Ted Cruz making an absolute fool of himself:
“September 11th was 25 years ago. It was a horrific moment for our entire country. And you can doubt whatever you want about Donald Trump, but the man is a New Yorker, he loves New York, and I have every doubt that what he’s conveying there is what he experienced and it was a traumatic experience for all of us.”
So Cruz is saying, at the same time, that Trump can’t possibly remember what happened 25 years ago, but also he’s pretty sure it was traumatic. Yes, so traumatic was the experience for Trump that he called into a radio show the day of the attacks to brag about how one of his buildings, 40 Wall Street, was now the tallest in New York. Besides the fact that it was not actually the tallest, what a ghoulish thing to do.
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle defended Trump by saying that he was just recounting his experiences and blamed “the failing legacy media” for attacking Trump.
Yes, how dare they mildly debunk the pack of lies Dear Leader can’t stop telling.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter what is going on inside Trump’s skull. The words coming out of his mouth are what matters, and they show a man completely deluded, characterologically unable to tell the truth, awash in fictions of his own making. And as long as he’s surrounded by people who will let him live in that world, we’re all stuck in here with him.
That’s it for now
We’ll be back this afternoon with a new episode of the PN Pod, then tomorrow with a special Saturday edition of Public Notice.
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Thanks for reading.
Thank you for articulating this so well. It's outlandish that we have a pathological, compulsive liar for a president.
A field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, was peaceful before Sept. 11, 2001. It is peaceful, still, but more alive than ever. The trees resiliently aleaf, summer or winter. Wind chimes breathing with shimmered wings. Black-eyed Susans, goldenrod, and purple asters, consolation-scented.
And if you offer their eternal bearers a fairly pure heart, they will whisper-wise to the hero you can be, still.