Donald Trump has once again exaggerated his role in the rescue of people caught up in the 9/11 terror attacks, this time claiming he “spent a lot of time” with emergency responders.
Speaking in the White House Rose Garden on Monday, the president offered no evidence to back up his claim.
While signing a law to provide permanent financial aid to survivors and first responders who became ill after working at the site of the fallen Twin Towers, Trump said: “Many of those affected were firefighters, police officers and other first responders.
“And I was down there also. But I am not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you.”
Trump has a dubious track record when it comes to the 9/11 attacks – see below – and his latest comments sparked the mocking hashtag #LostTrumpHistory.
Trump was at Ground Zero after the attacks, but his vague implication that he was lending a hand to the first responders looking for survivors is completely unsubstantiated.
A local news paper reported on 14 September 2001 that he was in the area the previous day.
The workers are so worn out that they barely glance at the sight of Donald Trump, every hair in place and impeccably dressed in a black suit, pressed white shirt and red tie, walking into the plaza with his cellular phone to his ear.
“No, no. The building’s gone,” he says into the phone.
He was also interviewed by a German outlet on the same day, but again was impeccably dressed in a suit, not overalls.
During the interview Trump claimed he had “a lot of men” helping out but an investigation by PolitiFact could not find any evidence to substantiate the claims.
Trump’s dubious relationship with 9/11 is well documented and his controversial comments on the terror attacks began just minutes after the Twin Towers collapsed.
During a phone-in interview with WWOR-T, he talked about a 72-story building he said he owned in lower Manhattan, saying “and now it’s the tallest”.
Trump has also repeatedly claimed that he saw Muslims celebrating on the day of the attacks, a persistent conspiracy theory that has never been proven true.
Perhaps most brazen of all, Trump has even claimed he predicted the 9/11 attacks in his book ‘The America We Deserve’, published in January 2000.
He did not.
The book contains one reference to Osama bin Laden and makes no mention of a planned terror attack.
More recently Trump has claimed he “lost hundreds of friends” from the attacks, but did not provide a single name to back up the assertion.
And at an election rally on November 2015, he said he watched from his apartment as people leapt from the crumbling towers and that he witnessed the second plane coming in.
Trump’s apartment in Trump Tower is four miles away so this would be highly unlikely.