Failure to call out Trump on his 9/11 lies
Trump snaps at a reporter after Trumpapalooza. (Andrew Harnik/Getty)
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.
















