Trump stood on the White House Ellipse Tuesday beside a 21-foot steel beam cut from the South Tower, 16,900 pounds of it, with FDNY first responders around him and the Tunnel to Towers Foundation running the ceremony. Two days earlier, on Fox News, he had described what he did after the towers fell.
"I went down. I was building a building in New York and I had a lot of construction workers, and I went down there very shortly thereafter, the following day, you couldn't go down the same day, but like, the following day, very quickly afterwards, and we worked long and hard, but it was just so terrible, so hopeless."
He went on 13 September 2001. Two days after, not the following day. A Newsday reporter found him there "impeccably dressed in a black suit," "every hair in place," working his cellphone. No one has put him or his workers in the recovery.
Richard Alles worked that pile for months. The retired FDNY deputy chief stood in the room at Trump's 2019 White House signing ceremony. He never saw Trump at the site: "I spent many months there myself, and I never witnessed him." He asked what a private citizen could have done down there anyway.
Timothy O'Brien wrote Trump's biography. He says Trump employed about twelve people at the time.
Twelve.
