Trump Claims Two Firemen Lifted Him Up and ‘Started Running With Me’ in Fresh 9/11 Account
President Donald Trump has offered a new, detailed account of a story he has told only occasionally since the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that two firefighters lifted him up and ran with him from the United States Steel building in Lower Manhattan as he feared the structure was about to collapse.
Speaking at a “Steel Across America” event outside the White House on Tuesday, Trump recalled taking a construction crew with him to the area near Ground Zero after the 2001 terror attacks and said the group went “right down there” without hesitation. “We went down as a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest. It was raw. Nobody’s seen anything like it, ever,” he said.
The president’s remarks were aimed at firefighters and service members assembled for an event organized by the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which is marking the 25th anniversary of the attacks with a cross-country tour of a steel beam recovered from the World Trade Center’s South Tower.
In the middle of those comments, Trump turned to his experience at the building once associated with U.S. Steel. “The United States Steel building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down because it creaked a lot,” he said. “It still creaks. But it never came down.”
He then described what happened next. “Two firemen, big strong guys — and I’m not the smallest guy in the world — they grabbed me under the arms and said, ‘Gotta get out of here,’ and they literally lifted me up,” Trump said. “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, but they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down.”
Trump did not specify when that scene occurred, and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for more information or independent corroboration.
During the same event, Trump recognized Welles Remy Crowther, the 24-year-old equities trader who died after saving multiple people in the South Tower, and told Crowther’s mother and sister that Crowther would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Crowther’s story was the subject of the 2017 documentary Man in Red Bandana, narrated by Gwyneth Paltrow.
Trump’s latest telling is another turn in a long series of claims about his proximity to the attacks and to the months-long recovery effort at Ground Zero. In the days after 9/11, he said in a German television interview that he had brought or sent hundreds of his workers to help clear the site. The New York Times reported in 2019 that it found no evidence supporting that claim, and Richard Alles, a retired fire battalion chief who worked at Ground Zero after the attack, told PolitiFact that year that he had “no knowledge” of Trump or any crew he dispatched taking part in the recovery operation.
“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,” Alles said. “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.”
The building at the center of Trump’s account, One Liberty Plaza, was originally owned by U.S. Steel and sits across from the World Trade Center site. After the towers collapsed, fears spread that it could also come down. New York City officials tried to counter those fears almost immediately and repeated for days that the tower was structurally sound. It reopened less than two months after the attacks, according to the Times.
CNN’s Daniel Dale, who has spent years tracking and fact-checking Trump’s statements, said on Tuesday that there is “not currently any public evidence” to support the idea that Trump entered the U.S. Steel building amid those collapse fears, “much less that he was rushed out by firefighters.” Photos and video from the following days, Dale said, show Trump in Lower Manhattan in a clean suit but not at the Ground Zero site itself.
Trump told a version of the story at a New Hampshire campaign stop in January 2016, saying at the time that the episode occurred “a couple of days” after 9/11. Then, he described “two massive, wonderful firemen” grabbing him as a screech of steel-on-steel prompted fears that the U.S. Steel building was falling. “I never knew I could run that fast,” he said at the time.
His public relationship with the Lower Manhattan skyline dates back to the day of the attack itself. In a call with a New Jersey television station that day, Trump noted that his company’s building in Lower Manhattan had been the tallest in that part of the city before the World Trade Center was built — and, with the twin towers gone, was tallest again. He later appeared in 2005 beside a model of “Twin Towers II,” a project he proposed near the site.
On this year’s anniversary, Trump is not scheduled to attend the ceremony at the World Trade Center site, despite his history as a New York figure. Instead, he is expected to participate in the commemoration at the Pentagon on Friday, as he did last year. Vice President JD Vance is expected to be in Manhattan, and administration officials will also be at the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania. Former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are expected at the New York ceremony, along with former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Tuesday’s event was the foundation’s latest stop before the anniversary, and Trump’s appearance gave him a platform to honor first responders. It also meant that, even with Trump away from the Ground Zero ceremony this year, his version of the immediate aftermath was back in the news.