Donald Trump’s Disastrous 9/11 Address
The dementia has fully set in
By: Austin Abbring
September 8, 2026
The dementia has completely melted Donald Trump’s mind. This is not a new revelation; however, today it reared its ugly head in the worst imaginable way possible: making false claims about his experience on September 11th, in front of victims’ families and first responders from that tragic day. Earlier today, at a White House event commemorating 9/11, the President claimed that he had to be carried away by two firemen from the former U.S. Steel Building, which started to creak following the Twin Towers being struck.
“We thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big, strong guys - I’m not the smallest guy in the world - 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. They lifted me up, and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself,’ but they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down.”
As you can expect, there is no evidence to back these claims up from Poltico or the New York Fire Department. Donald Trump was not at Ground Zero until two days later, as he has claimed many times over the years, along with various retellings of this story, that he brought hundreds of his guys to help with cleanup and do whatever they could to support recovery efforts. This is another claim that is not supported by evidence. Donald Trump was in his office at Trump Tower that day, which is four miles from Ground Zero. He spent the day doing phone interviews, in which he claimed he could see people jumping from the towers. Any recollection of that day and the surrounding days by Trump is simply a grandiose compilation of lies, mischaracterizations, stolen valor, and egregious levels of narcissism. It is horrifying and is a perfect display of the president’s true character. Again, nothing new about any of this to anyone who has even remotely followed politics in the trump era.
I am not going to criticize Trump for not bringing in “his guys” or rushing to Ground Zero. That is not the point. The point is how truly awful this level of lying is in front of actual heroes who made sacrifices that day. Thousands of people never saw their loved ones again after that morning. To get in front of those individuals and put on that display is beyond disturbing.
From that same address, the president doubled down on his narcissism. Trump went after the “fame” of Welles Crowther, the hero known as “The Man in the Red Bandana” who rescued nearly two dozen people on 9/11. He was tragically killed when the South Tower finally collapsed as he was ushering people out.
Donald Trump had this to say: “After the plane hit the South Tower, a group of people on the 78th floor were trapped with broken bones, charred skin, and eyes and lungs filled with black smoke. Death was all about them. It was certain. They were sure they were going to die. Then suddenly a rescuer appeared. They called him “The Man in the Red Bandana”. Have you heard that term? “The Man in the Red Bandana” has become more famous than me. I don’t like it. Very unhappy, but he’s become much more famous than me.”
I know this isn't the most technical analysis, but what the fuck are we doing? I mean, are we serious right now? How did this plane of reality become ours? This is a new low, even for Donald Trump. A man with an impressively exorbitant number of new lows. I will never understand how anyone takes this man seriously. It’s not even worth addressing how blatantly flippant this obviously is. Anyone with any inkling of decency knows how wrong this is, even some Republicans. This is how I know MAGA voters do not actually watch Trump speeches. Unfortunately, I've spent far too many hours doing so. This man is a character they (MAGA) like and have no clue about policy or how he actually speaks. You could take any speech from Trump, not tell someone it is a speech of his, transcribe it, read it to that person, and they would all come back with the exact same resolution: This man is clearly insane, unwell, and not fit for any office - not even county comptroller. Yet, here we are with the privilege of him serving the highest office of arguably the most powerful and influential country on the planet. The inability of Donald Trump to not think or speak about himself for more than 10 seconds is astonishing. We should all be embarrassed, every last one of us.
Two more quick things to address here as well. One, that during this speech, Donald Trump found a way to use the 9/11 attacks as a justification for his war against Iran. This has numerous parallels to our war in Iraq, where we invaded that country on a lie spoon-fed by Israel about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. The old chestnut of a preemptive war of defense. Just copy and paste 2003 into 2026, and we are well on our way to repeating a forever war in the Middle East that we will lose and struggle to get out of. We just have not seen the levels of loss of human life and trillions of dollars wasted, but things are still bleak. The final point I want to highlight explains a lot about today's speech. Literally, on the afternoon of 9/11, Donald Trump was on the phone with a local New York news station, practically bragging about his building being the tallest in Manhattan following the destruction of the towers in the attacks.
When being asked about the condition of Trump Tower, Donald Trump said, “40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest - and then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest. And now it’s the tallest.” We could have seen this coming. Mere hours after the attacks, Donald Trump finds his own personal silver lining in one of the darkest days in our country’s history. The self-absorption has always been there. Now we have to deal with it in the office of the president and attempt to save face as a nation. You know, normal stuff. If you thought the George Bush Jr. years were rough waters to traverse, Donald Trump is a Pangea-sized iceberg in those waters.
Comments