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.
“I spent a lot of time down there with you”
Two days after September 11, Trump did an
interview with a German television station — because of course he was
not going to pass up a media hit — saying, “We have over 100 and we have about
125 coming. So we’ll have a couple hundred people down here. And they are very
brave and what they’re doing is amazing. And we will be involved in some form
in helping to reconstruct.”
But by later that day, when talking to NBC, it was now
“hundreds of men working inside right now” with more on the way, and “they’ve
never seen bodies like this before, bodies all over.”
You are probably not going to be surprised to learn
that no
one can verify that Trump sent hundreds of workers to Ground Zero to
help clean up.
By the 2016 election, Trump was saying he personally helped clear rubble at the site, a claim which is as easily disproved as it is ridiculous.
Does anyone really think that Donald Trump, of all people,
would have lifted a finger without having a full camera crew document it all
for posterity? And does anyone really think that Donald Trump, of all people,
did the grim, grueling work of clearing away steel and cement, all the
while breathing
in toxins?
And by his first term, Trump wasn’t just at Ground Zero. He
was there for a long time, as he explained with some absurd faux
modesty: “Many of those affected were firefighters, police officers, and
other first responders. And I was down there also, but I’m not considering
myself a first responder. But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down
there with you.”
There is, of course, no evidence showing Trump spent any
meaningful amount of time at the site.
Trump has always inflated his role in 9/11, but these days, he’s living in a fantasyland, one that he makes and remakes daily, where he’s always the star of the show.
Alert the media: the truth is knowable
The mainstream media is, unsurprisingly, not covering itself
in glory as it struggles to avoid saying that either the president’s brain has
completely left the station or that he’s a mendacious liar who knows no bounds,
or both.
So the Washington Post went with saying that Trump was repeating his “disputed account of his role in recovery.” The New York Times went with calling this slop “a series of questionable and provocative statements to burnish his political brand.”
It is indeed provocative, though probably not in the way the New York Times meant, for the president of the United States to either be lying about his role responding to the deadliest attack on American soil or be so addled that he thinks he genuinely was down there pulling away chunks of cement and narrowly escaping death from a tumbling building which then never actually tumbled.
Also not covering themselves in glory? Trump sycophants.
Here’s Ted Cruz making an absolute fool of himself:
“September 11th was 25 years ago. It was a horrific moment for our entire country. And you can doubt whatever you want about Donald Trump, but the man is a New Yorker, he loves New York, and I have every doubt that what he’s conveying there is what he experienced and it was a traumatic experience for all of us.”
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle defended Trump by
saying that he was just recounting his experiences and blamed “the
failing legacy media” for attacking Trump.
Yes, how dare they mildly debunk the pack of lies Dear
Leader can’t stop telling.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter what is going on inside
Trump’s skull. The words coming out of his mouth are what matters, and they
show a man completely deluded, characterologically unable to tell the truth,
awash in fictions of his own making. And as long as he’s surrounded by people
who will let him live in that world, we’re all stuck in here with him.
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