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Donald Trump's executive has revealed what he really did in the hours after 9/11.
The president has repeated claims for years about what he says he saw and did after the September 11 attacks.
But as the 25th anniversary approaches, a new account of the story has raised questions about what actually happened.
During a White House event honoring 9/11 first responders on Tuesday (September 8), Trump claimed firefighters once carried him away after fears that a nearby building was about to collapse.
He said he and members of his team went to Ground Zero shortly after the attacks and described a moment when two firefighters grabbed him and moved him to safety.
"For nine months, rescue and recovery crews worked day and night on the site. I want to just thank my people; I took a lot of my me(n) - I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened," he said.
“And they were - they had no hesitation - everybody went down with me. We went down, it was a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest - it was, you know, it was raw, and nobody’s seen anything like it, ever.
“We had other buildings; 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.”
He then described firefighters allegedly moving him away from danger.
“I re(member) - 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 arms, said, 'Gotta 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, but they thought it was coming down; it didn’t come down. US Steel," he added.
The president did not say exactly when the firefighters supposedly helped him, but his comments suggested it happened after he went to Ground Zero.
However, Trump was not near the World Trade Center when the attacks happened. He was at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan, several miles away.
A former Trump Organization executive told Politico in 2016 that Trump’s actions that day were not unusual.
In a previous version of the story, Trump said the firefighter incident happened "a couple of days" after the attacks.
In a post shared on Truth Social on Tuesday (September 8), he also wrote that it was "obviously not on the same day as the collapse, but shortly thereafter".
The White House did not provide evidence or additional details when asked about Trump’s account, but it did say in an unsigned email sent on Tuesday: "He was a private citizen at the time, not everything he did was documented," per CNN.
Later, spokesperson Davis Ingle criticized media coverage of the story: "President Trump spent the morning paying tribute to the heroic first responders who laid down their lives in service to others in the September 11th attacks and honoring their incredible families.
"The President was relaying his experience of a city reeling immediately after and in the days and weeks after the horrific attacks — and the fact that the failing legacy media is using this to try to attack him is a disgrace and yet another reason why Americans’ trust in the media is at an all-time low," Ingle added.
Trump later wrote that "everything I said was exactly accurate".
There is no public evidence that Trump was inside the US Steel building after the attacks or that firefighters moved him away from it.
His comments in the hours after 9/11 also tell a different story. During a live interview with WWOR/UPN 9 News, Trump described watching a "huge explosion" after the planes hit the World Trade Center.
When asked if security had been increased at Trump Tower, he said: "We've always had very strong security, but there's very little you can do about planes crashing into a building."
He also spoke about his nearby property, the 71-story 40 Wall Street, which was only blocks from the World Trade Center.
He said it "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."
But according to Forbes, that was not accurate. The nearby 70 Pine Street was actually 25 feet taller than 40 Wall Street.
