# Donald Trump — "two firemen lifted me up" > [!quote] "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." > — Donald Trump, White House 9/11 commemoration, September 8, 2026 ## Context Speaking off script at a White House event honoring those who died on 9/11, on the eve of the twenty-fifth anniversary, [[Donald Trump]] said he had taken a crew downtown "right after this happened," described the [[U.S. Steel]] building creaking as though about to collapse — "it still creaks, but uh, it never came down" — and told the story above. CNN's Daniel Dale reported the same day that there is no evidence for any of it. Trump was at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan when the planes hit, miles from the World Trade Center, and was not evacuated from any building near the site that day. He has never produced evidence for his longstanding claims that he worked at Ground Zero or organized a crew that did. The White House did not defend the account on its facts. It said instead: "He was a private citizen at the time, not everything he did was documented." Spokesman Davis Ingle attacked the press for "using this to try to attack him." Trump posted on [[Truth Social]]: **"Everything I said was exactly accurate."** ## Why This Matters The interest here is structural rather than biographical. This is not a claim that was made once and can be checked once; it is the newest layer on a set of 9/11 stories Trump has told for two decades — the thousands cheering in New Jersey, the friends he lost, the work at the site — none of which have ever been substantiated, and each of which places him inside an event he watched from four miles uptown. What the September 2026 version adds is the response pattern in compressed form. The claim is unverifiable rather than merely false ("not everything he did was documented"), the fact-check is recast as an attack, and the President's own restatement — "exactly accurate" — is offered as the evidence the account otherwise lacks. That is the same three-step the vault records against the Kharg Island video and the Iran readiness leaks: the disclosure is answered, not the substance. > [!warning] One element not carried here > The letter that surfaced this quote also reports that Trump's nephew Fred Trump III publicly disputed the story, telling the *Daily Beast* his uncle had no building under construction at the time. That account traces to a single outlet and is not recorded on this page pending a second independent source. ## See Also - [[Donald Trump]] - [[September 11 Attacks]] - [[U.S. Steel]] - [[Truth Social]] - [[Republican Midterm Convention]]