Yesterday, Minnesota state representative Steve Drazkowski shared the meme at the top of this posts with his friends on Facebook and the world at large.
While the meme claims "you will never see these kinds of stories from liberal media, the fact is that this heart-warming tale of businessman Trump's largesse actually has been shared by the American press-- and debunked by some. It's never been confirmed.
A social media post paints President Donald Trump as a hero in the days immediately following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The post, which displays a photo of Trump near Ground Zero, says, "2 days following the attacks on 9/11 Donald Trump was at ground zero with hundreds of workers that he paid out of his own pocket to help find and identify the victims. This was many years before he would even think of running for president. He’s been supporting the America he loves for decades, but you will never see these kinds of stories in the liberal media."
The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)
It is correct that Trump was at least near the site two days after the attacks, but whether he paid hundreds of workers to help in search-and-rescue efforts is less clear. Because we don’t have enough information, we don’t feel we can make a ruling.
Here's what we can confirm:
The particular image used in this post was not taken two days after the attack. According to Getty Images’ archive, the picture was captured on September 18 outside the New York Stock Exchange by New York Daily News photographer Todd Maisel.
That said, we know that Trump was indeed nearby the site two days after the attacks (as well as the day of), when he gave an interview to a German television station a few blocks away.
At one point in that interview, Trump tells the reporter he had "a lot of men" down there helping already.
"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," Trump said.
He made similar comments in an NBC interview that same day:
"I have hundreds of men inside working right now, and we’re bringing down another 125 in a little while. And they’ve never done anything like this before. And they’re hard-working people, but they’ve never seen anything like it."
At one point the reporter asks if Trump had spoken to his men about the emotional situation, to which he replies, "Well there are a lot of them, but they’ve never seen bodies like this before, bodies all over."
On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump repeated the claim at a rally in Buffalo, but a little more vaguely: "Everyone who helped clear the rubble—and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit—but I want to tell you: Those people were amazing," Trump said. "Clearing the rubble. Trying to find additional lives. You didn't know what was going to come down on all of us—and they handled it."
At the time he made that comment, the Washington Post also noted Trump’s 2001 statements but reported there was no further information about workers helpinh. The Post also contacted Trump’s campaign for an explanation of what he meant when he said he "helped" but didn’t receive a response.
We reached out the White House to corroborate the claim but did not hear back.
Our conclusion
Text attached to a photo of Donald Trump near Ground Zero in 2001 says two days after the attacks he hired hundreds of workers, who he paid out of his own pocket, to help and identify victims.
It is accurate that Trump was at least near Ground Zero two days following the Sept. 11 attacks, but we could not independently verify whether he paid hundreds of workers to help in rescue and recovery efforts.
Perhaps Draz was shooting for truthiness, one of that decade's words of the year.
Snopes rules "unproven." Gothamist's Ben Yakas reviewed A Brief And Depressing History Of Donald Trump Exploiting & Lying About 9/11 in July.
Wednesday, Rebecca Morin at USA Today reported in Trump again said he helped at ground zero immediately following the 9/11 attacks:
President Donald Trump honored thousands that died as a result of the Sept. 11 terror attacks during remarks at the Pentagon Wednesday.
But the president also didn't miss a chance to again claim he helped in the aftermath of the terror attacks at ground zero.
"I was looking out of a window from a building at Midtown Manhattan directly at the World Trade Center when I saw a second plane at a tremendous speed go into the second tower. It was then that I realized the world was going to change. I was no longer going to be, and it could never, ever be that innocent place that I thought it was," Trump said.
"Soon after, I went down to Ground Zero with men who worked for me to try to help in any little way that we could," he continued. "We were not alone. So many others were scattered around trying to do the same. They were all trying to help." . . .
Trump was several blocks from ground zero just two days after the attack, where he did an interview with a German news station. In the interview, the business mogul then asserted that he had "a lot of men down" there.
"We have over 100, another 125 coming," he said at the time.
There is also an image of Trump outside the New York Stock Exchange on Sept. 18, 2001, a week from the attacks.
But there is still no evidence that Trump helped at ground zero in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.
Alles in a separate interview with PolitiFact in July said that he had no knowledge of Trump being at ground zero or sending at least 100 workers to help. Alles told PolitiFact that he was at the scene 20 minutes after the second building collapsed.
"I was in a supervisory role with the fire department at the time," he said. "I was there for several months — I have no knowledge of his being down there."
In addition, Alles said "there would be a record" if Trump had sent a crew of at least 100 workers to help out at ground zero.
"Everybody worked under direct supervision of the police and fire department and the joint commander for emergency services," he said. "Is there a chance he was ever down there by himself and I didn’t know it? It’s possible, but I know of no one who ever witnessed him there." . . .
The Washington Post examined the claims yesterday in Trump’s fuzzy vision on the Sept. 11 attacks.
Some of the WaPo's material is drawn from a New York Times article published at the end of July, Fact-Checking Trump’s Claim He ‘Spent a Lot of Time’ With 9/11 Responders:
President Trump walked into the Rose Garden on Monday and signed into law a bill that would permanently fund the care of emergency workers who became ill after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He also revived an old claim that he spent time at ground zero alongside firefighters and police officers.
Mr. Trump has a long history of making questionable and provocative statements about what he saw on the day of the attacks and how he reacted, some critical of Muslims. On Monday, surrounded by emergency medical workers who had lost colleagues and friends in the attacks, Mr. Trump sought again to place himself near the center of the recovery effort.
WHAT TRUMP SAID:
“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.”
This is exaggerated.
According to Richard Alles, a retired deputy chief with the New York Fire Department, Mr. Trump was not a presence at ground zero.
“I spent many months there myself, and I never witnessed him,” Mr. Alles, who was at the Rose Garden event on Monday, said in an interview. “He was a private citizen at the time. I don’t know what kind of role he could have possibly played.” . . .
Mr. Trump’s claims about where he was and what he was doing during the attacks date back years, with him often inserting and removing details along the way, Timothy O’Brien, the author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,” said in an interview.
“Donald Trump was absolutely not a first responder by any standard definition,” Mr. O’Brien said. “If we’re defining it as the first wave of people who arrived at ground zero to provide help, he was not in that wave.”
On the day of the attack, Mr. Trump called into WWOR-TV to say that he had a window in Trump Tower that looked directly over the World Trade Center.
As the buildings burned, the show’s anchors praised his real estate prowess in a wide-ranging interview. Mr. Trump said that if he had decided to run for president in 2000, he would have taken a “hard line” on the perpetrators, and that he had “somebody down there” near the attack who had witnessed at least 10 people jumping out of the World Trade Center towers.
A photo taken of him on Sept. 18, 2001, has been used in a widely circulated meme that claims Mr. Trump personally traveled to ground zero with hundreds of workers to help uncover victims.
Mr. O’Brien, the author, said the size of the Trump Organization at the time was “a little bit over a dozen people,” which would have made it impossible to send hundreds of people to participate in the relief effort. At the time, Mr. Trump had a large number of casino workers based in Atlantic City, but there is no documented evidence of him marshaling his resources to aid in the relief effort.
“He’s very comfortable propagandizing that event for political purposes,” Mr. O’Brien said. “Even in the face of tragedy, he can’t help but self-promote and self-aggrandize.”
Frankly, one can read quite a bit about this cozy tale in the media.
And there's Trump's own musing on a radio show on September 11, 2001:
As the buildings burned, the show’s anchors praised his real estate prowess in a wide-ranging interview. Mr. Trump said that if he had decided to run for president in 2000, he would have taken a “hard line” on the perpetrators, and that he had “somebody down there” near the attack who had witnessed at least 10 people jumping out of the World Trade Center towers.
while the meme insists "it would be years before he would even think of running for President."
In 2015, TV Guide published Here's a Timeline of Every Time Donald Trump Ran for President, outlining the reality television star's ambitions:
. . .1987-1988: Trump considers a run for president, while simultaneously juggling large debts stemming from his purchase of the Taj Mahal casino.
2000: Trump enters the presidential race as a Reform Party candidate and receives more than 15,000 votes in the party's California primary.
2003-2004: Trump begins hosting the reality show The Apprentice on NBC, which he also executive-produces. He again mulls a run for president, but ultimately decides not to join the race. . . .
There's truth, and then there's Drazkowski's truths.
Screengrab: Draz shared this gem on Patriot Day. While the meme claims you'll never see the news covered in "liberal media," Trump's version of this "news" has been examined exhaustively.
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