A member of President Donald Trump’s own family went public on X on Tuesday evening, September 8, 2026, to knock down the president’s story about pitching in at Ground Zero after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. His nephew wrote that the claim about bringing a crew of workers to the site offended him.
The president’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., died in 1981 after a heart attack at 42; Fred Trump III, 63, is his son. Posting from the account @FredTrump_, he opened by accounting for his timing: two reports touching on the 9/11 tragedy had surfaced that day, and he wanted to deal with them immediately, since waiting to do so “on the 25th anniversary this Friday would take away from the solemn memories.”
“I try not to comment personally about my uncle, but his claim that he brought a crew of workers to help at the sight so offends me that I need to speak out,” he wrote, in his own spelling.
The family rift is years old. Fred Trump III has gone after his uncle in public since the 2024 publication of his memoir, “All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way.” The book alleged that his uncle said his severely disabled son should die, and it laid out what he called a scheme to cut him out of the family fortune.
What the President Has Said
The subject kept drawing the 80-year-old President back to it as the anniversary approached. On “Sunday Night in America with Trey Gowdy” on September 6, he said he had gone down to the site “the following day” and that “we worked long and hard.” Two days later, a Tunnel to Towers commemoration built around a beam from the South Tower — the Steel Across America event on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, September 8 — gave him occasion to return to the U.S. Steel Building, now called One Liberty Plaza, saying he had been evacuated from it.
“The United States Steel building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down,” he said. By his account, two firefighters then carried him off: “They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself,’ but they were amazing.”
The Nephew Answers Point by Point
At both events, the president said the World Trade Center was struck while he had a large building going up in New York City. The project underway then was Trump World Tower, on United Nations Plaza in Midtown.
The only crew his uncle claimed to have taken downtown, Fred Trump III wrote, would have been made up of secretarial and accounting staff from Trump Tower. He said he knew many of them and was “pretty sure they were not capable physically to help (if they could, I am sure they would try).”
The near-collapse story drew his objection, too. One of the U.S. Steel Building’s original engineers was the grandfather of a close friend, he wrote, and “the bldg was built strong.” An engineer — the brother of one of his partners — was called in immediately to inspect it, and despite the early alarm, the building “was eventually cleared for occupancy — not creaking and ready to fall.”
A Story That Has Changed Over Time
The president’s telling has shifted across the years. His first version had him dispatching dozens of construction workers to the site. By the 2016 campaign, he had firefighters rushing him out of the U.S. Steel Building in the days after the attacks, once it began to creak. By 2021, he had added that he was physically lifted away from the scene.
Two days after the towers fell, speaking to the German broadcaster N24 from a spot several blocks from the wreckage, Trump put his own workforce at the site at more than 100 construction workers, with about 125 more due to arrive. He was at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan when the towers were struck, a distance of four miles away from both the trade center site and the U.S. Steel Building.
Photographs and video that have circulated since put him downtown twice over the following weeks, in the Wall Street area both times rather than on the pile. One is an NBC interview time-stamped September 13, 2001; the other is a set of Getty Images pictures dated September 18.
How the White House Responded
White House spokesman Davis Ingle said the president “was relaying his experience of a city reeling immediately after and in the days and weeks after the horrific attacks.” Press scrutiny of it was “a disgrace,” Ingle said, pointing as well to low public trust in the media. No supporting material for the president’s version came from the White House. Asked by reporters about it, Trump said his account was “exactly accurate.”
A Second Post, on Rudy Giuliani
Fred Trump III posted again on Wednesday morning, September 9, turning to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, he wrote, “said he would attend memorial services as is his right,” and Giuliani said soon afterward that “he was offended by Mamdani’s” attendance. He then cast that objection as religious, invoking President George W. Bush’s declaration after the attacks that “Islam is peace.” No outlet has published the post in full.
What Took Place on the Anniversary
The attacks killed 2,977 people. The Pentagon, not the Ground Zero ceremony on Friday, September 11, is where Trump marked the day, joined by First Lady Melania Trump, while Vice President JD Vance represented the administration in Lower Manhattan. Mamdani did attend; he and Giuliani shook hands on arrival, then sat together during the reading of the names.
The nephew has said nothing further. No follow-up post, no interview and no reply from Giuliani has come in the week since for Fred Trump III. The president, for his part, revisited the ceremony on September 13. His target was Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., whom he attacked over a clip of the two smiling during the roll call. “It’s not a place to be laughing,” he said.
