The New York Times is fact-checking a claim that Trump made the other day, where he suggested he was at Ground Zero:
“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.”
Trump suggests that he was a 9/11 First Responder pic.twitter.com/cFnVkV3wru
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 29, 2019
No he doesn’t. He literally says he was not a first responder. He was clear about that. Geez.
In any event the Times says of Trump’s claim “This is exaggerated”, suggesting he wasn’t really down there:
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. Alles said he had vivid memories of meeting Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, who became an integral part of passing the bill after the attacks. Ms. Maloney did not attend the event at the White House on Monday.
Got it? Nobody saw him. He wasn’t there.
The Times continues…
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.
The Times finally admits that Trump was at Ground Zero at September 13, about 14 paragraphs down, but they play it off like it’s not what he was talking about:
In the days after the attack, Mr. Trump ventured outside of Trump Tower to provide commentary, which largely focused on real estate and estimating the building costs of recovery. In an interview with a German television station on Sept. 13, 2001, Mr. Trump was asked if he would be personally involved in the recovery effort.
“I have a lot of men down here right now,” Mr. Trump said. “We have over 100 and we have 125 coming. So we’ll have a couple of hundred people down here.” He added: “We will be involved in some form helping to reconstruct.”
German TV station? Try NBC News. Here’s the video:
MSM: Trump lied and said he was at Ground Zero during the aftermath of 9/11
Reality: pic.twitter.com/qw5t8ryemi
— Eddie Zipperer (@EddieZipperer) July 30, 2019
Trump never said what day he was at Ground Zero. He just said he was there, and this video shows he wasn’t lying. He talked about it with the NBC News reporter, talking about what he’d seen while he was there.
But the NY Times still goes after this as if it’s a false claim. This is why they are fake news. Obama could lie his butt off as president and the media didn’t care. Trump makes a casual statement about being at Ground Zero after 9/11 and the media must give the claim an anal exam.
Pathetic!