President Donald Trump revived a disputed 9/11 account during a Medal of Freedom ceremony, prompting fresh pushback from a first responder who said he never saw Trump at Ground Zero.
The remarks came Tuesday on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., where Trump, 78, presented the nation’s highest civilian honor to the family of Welles Crowther, a 24-year-old equities trader and volunteer firefighter who died saving an estimated 18 people in the World Trade Center’s South Tower. Crowther became known as “the man in the red bandanna” for the cloth he tied over his face to shield himself from smoke.
Alison Crowther, Welles’s mother, accepted the medal alongside her daughter Paige Crowther Charbonneau. She told the crowd, “Twenty five years after September 11th, his life continues to remind us of something very simple,” adding, “In moments when others need us, each of us has the power to keep courage, compassion and service. That’s the real meaning of the red bandanna: To be courageous, to find the good, and to be the good.”
Trump appeared to acknowledge the hero’s fame, telling attendees, “The man in the red bandanna has become more famous than me. I don’t like it.”
Before honoring Crowther, Trump repeated a claim that two firefighters grabbed him and carried him away as the nearby U.S. Steel Building, now One Liberty Plaza, appeared close to collapse. “And two firemen, big strong guys… They grabbed me under the arms,” he said. He added, “We thought it was coming down on top of us.”
This was not the first time Trump told this story. In 2016, he gave a similar account, though that time he said the building was “not so far from us,” suggesting he had not been inside it.
Richard Alles, a retired New York City Fire Department battalion chief, pushed back against Trump’s broader claims of presence at the site. He told PolitiFact in 2019 he had “no knowledge” of Trump being at Ground Zero, and noted that a crew of 100 workers would have left a record.
Video footage does show Trump in a suit near Ground Zero days after the attacks, but not at the site of the collapse itself. A separate clip, resurfaced by the pro-Trump account Trump War Room, shows him claiming on September 13, 2001, that he had “about 100 men working down here” and “was just down at Ground Zero.”
Trump also claimed Tuesday that he brought “a big group of people” from his construction company to assist in recovery efforts, without specifying when.
The White House defended the president in a statement: “He was a private citizen at the time, not everything he did was documented.”
Spokesperson Davis Ingle fired back at critics yesterday afternoon: “President Trump spent the morning paying tribute to the heroic first responders who laid down their lives in service to others in the September 11th attacks and honoring their incredible families,” He continued, “The President was relaying his experience of a city reeling immediately after and in the days and weeks after the horrific attacks, and the fact that the failing legacy media is using this to try to attack him is a disgrace and yet another reason why Americans’ trust in the media is at an all-time low.”
Tuesday’s ceremony was organized by the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which supports families of fallen first responders and has toured a recovered WTC steel beam to sites including Mount Rushmore and Major League Baseball stadiums. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose brother Gary died at Cantor Fitzgerald on 9/11, was among the Cabinet officials in attendance.
Trump’s history includes other disputed 9/11 claims, including a 2015 assertion that “thousands and thousands of people were cheering” as the towers fell in New Jersey, and a 2016 claim he “helped a little bit” clearing rubble.
The ceremony honoring Crowther came as the nation approaches the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.