Year 25 of the Emergency That Never Ended

Twenty-five years after the towers fell, the president who says two firemen carried him to safety is the same one presiding over the emergency that has kept America at war ever since.

"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."

— President Donald Trump, White House Ellipse, September 8, 2026

On Tuesday, at a White House ceremony honoring the firefighters and police who answered the 2001 attacks, Donald Trump delivered the newest and most embellished version of the most contested personal saga in American politics: how he saved himself on September 11.

The audience included more than 100 first responders. The setting was chosen with care. And the story was the longest version yet of a claim he has made, in one form or another, for two decades.

The U.S. Steel Building, he said, was "creaking, really creaking." Two firefighters "grabbed me under the arm," lifted him up, and started running. "I said, 'Fellas, I can run myself,' but they were amazing." He was, apparently, too heavy for his own legs on the day the country fell. Days earlier, in a Fox News interview that aired Sunday, he had laid the groundwork: he was "building a building in New York," he said, with "a lot of construction workers," and he "went down there" right away. "We worked long and hard."

The first thing to notice about the story is how specific it is. The creaking building. The big, strong guys. The dialogue. The second thing to notice is that it has no witnesses at all.

The public record begins two days after the attacks. The earliest known footage of Trump near Ground Zero is from September 13, 2001. On a German television station that day, he claimed to have "over 100" construction workers at the site, with another 125 on the way. CNN cited a Newsday account of him at the scene on that same day, "impeccably dressed in a black suit, every hair in place." The Associated Press reported he was "giving high-fives to police officers and volunteers on their way to the World Trade Center site."

That is the entire evidentiary base for the heroic account. PolitiFact, which examined the workers claim in 2019 and again this week, has found no evidence that Trump brought hundreds of men to the site. Richard Alles, a fire battalion chief on duty the day of the attacks, who reached the scene about 20 minutes after the second tower fell and remained for months, was blunt about what a crew of 100 would have required. "There would be a record of it," Alles told PolitiFact. "Everybody worked under direct supervision of the police and fire department and the joint commander for emergency services." He added: "I know of no one who ever witnessed him there."

Neither of the two firefighters who supposedly carried the president to safety has ever been named, let alone come forward. When PolitiFact asked the White House for details, the White House pointed to the Trump Organization. The Trump Organization did not respond.

Translation: a story with no witnesses, no records, and no way to verify it, told to the very professionals whose credibility it borrows.

The embellishment is not a memory problem. It is a growth pattern. In 2016, the version was shorter: he had been "down there," he said, and had brought workers. By 2021, the firefighters had appeared. By 2026, he was being physically lifted out of a building that, in his telling, "still creaks." Each retelling adds more danger and more hero.

He has lied about 9/11 in other ways too. On the day of the attacks, he boasted on WWOR-TV that he now owned the tallest building in downtown Manhattan. He has claimed to have watched thousands of Muslims "cheering" in Jersey City as the towers fell, and to have "predicted" the attacks in one of his books. He pledged $10,000 to a victims' recovery fund in 2001 that the city comptroller found never arrived. More than 15 years later, his foundation gave $100,000 to the 9/11 Memorial. And his companies collected $150,000 from a post-9/11 recovery program, an application that a 2016 Daily News investigation found requested compensation for "lost rent, cleanup, and repairs," not the heroic sheltering he later claimed.

Journalist Ron Filipkowski, who has tracked the claims for years, called the firefighter version "stolen valor." "Trump could have made the ceremony with 9/11 first responders today about the many heroes who died attempting to rescue people," he said. "But instead, he created a fictitious event featuring himself, who did nothing, as the hero of 9/11."

The outrage was immediate, and it had a strange political shape. Governor Gavin Newsom criticized the account. But the harshest objections came from where you might expect: conservative figures expressed "offense" at the plan of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim, to attend the 9/11 commemorations this week. A president who has spent two decades inflating his proximity to the attacks is the week's problem; a Muslim mayor attending a candlelight vigil is the scandal.

Tim Fullerton, a former digital strategist for the Obama administration, put it plainly: "The people mad about the Mayor of New York attending the 9/11 event must be ENRAGED that Trump just lied about being at ground zero on 9/11."

Mamdani released roughly 170,000 pages of records on that same Tuesday, showing that the Giuliani administration misled New Yorkers about air quality risks near Ground Zero. A mayor with no role in the attacks, and no need to invent one, doing the work a president skipped.

Meanwhile, the actual infrastructure of the anniversary is being renewed without fanfare. Earlier this week, the Trump administration posted a notice in the Federal Register renewing the national emergency that President George W. Bush declared three days after the attacks. It is the 25th consecutive year.

The justification, in full, is that the administration needs these powers to address "the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States," because "the terrorist threat continues."

The emergency was never supposed to look like this. Proclamation 7463, signed September 14, 2001, and its companion Executive Order 13224 were framed as temporary tools for mobilizing the National Guard and sanctioning terrorist financiers. Congress was supposed to reauthorize emergencies of this kind every six months; reports have found no evidence that has ever happened properly. Every president since Bush has renewed the order, until renewal became the only thing anyone could conceive of.

Julie Myers Wood, a senior Treasury official who helped build the sanctions framework after 2001 and later ran ICE, wrote recently about what that framework became. "No one decided the framework should be permanent and designed it accordingly," she wrote. "Renewal simply continued, because letting the authority lapse was unthinkable and reopening it was problematic. It became permanent anyway." Her point is not lost on this administration. "Not one of those authorities was written with Venezuela in mind," she added. "Or fentanyl. Or a shipping lane."

Brown University's Costs of War project estimates the post-9/11 wars cost at least $8 trillion in military spending between 2001 and 2022, killed roughly 4.5 million people, and stretched American military operations across at least 78 countries. The current president has since added Iran, the Caribbean, and the Pacific to that list, along with a domestic campaign against dissent.

Elizabeth Goitein, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center, said it in 2017, when the emergency was in its sixteenth year: "We should not be treating 9/11 as an emergency in 2017." In its twenty-fifth, the answer is still no.

On Friday, the country marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Trump will not attend the New York ceremony. The New York Times reported that the 9/11 Memorial has barred politicians from speaking at the site since 2012, and he has no interest in going without a speech. He will attend the ceremony at the Pentagon in Arlington instead, the other place the planes hit. Vice President JD Vance will go to New York.

Twenty-five years ago, the emergency was declared as a temporary measure, days at most. The man who says it took two firemen to carry him out of the rubble now presides over the longest standing emergency in American history, the longest war, and the most detailed fiction. The Ground Zero story is missing exactly one element: anyone else being there. The rest of us have been paying for the emergency ever since.