President Donald Trump’s nephew is publicly disputing his uncle’s headline-making claims about his response to the Sept. 11 attacks.
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“I try not to comment personally about my uncle,” Fred Trump wrote on X, “but his claim…so offends me that I need to speak out.”
Trump’s story about his response to 9/11 has shifted repeatedly over the years. He initially said he sent dozens of construction workers to help at the site.
By the 2016 campaign, he was telling a dramatic tale of firefighters rushing him out of a nearby high-rise after cracks reportedly appeared in its structure.
That account grew even more elaborate by 2021, with Trump adding that he was physically carried out during the rescue. He repeated the claim again this week, telling Fox News he “went down” to Ground Zero and worked there personally, then retelling the building evacuation story at a White House event Tuesday.
That was enough for Fred Trump, author of a 2024 memoir detailing allegations against his uncle, to break his usual silence, The Daily Beast reported on Wednesday.
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“The only crew he claimed to bring to the site would have been secretarial and accounting employees from Trump Tower,” Fred Trump wrote. “I knew many of them, and pretty sure they were not capable physically to help (if they could, I am sure they would try).”
The Daily Beast noted that in an interview with a German broadcaster just two days after the attacks, Trump said he had more than 100 construction workers already helping, with 125 more on the way.
Fred also took aim at the building-collapse story specifically, citing personal connections to engineers involved with the structure. He said the building was built solidly and was inspected and cleared for occupancy shortly after the attacks, contradicting Trump’s dramatic account of near-collapse.
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle defended the president, framing the story as Trump simply describing his personal experience of the city in the aftermath of the attacks and criticizing media scrutiny of the account. The White House has not yet responded to Fred Trump’s specific rebuttal.
Trump, the Daily Beast reports, was actually at Trump Tower roughly two and a half miles from Ground Zero at the time of the attacks. He plans to skip Friday’s official memorial event marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11.
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