President Donald Trump’s nephew went on X on Tuesday evening, September 8, 2026, to dispute the president’s account of pitching in at Ground Zero after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, saying his uncle’s claim about bringing a crew of workers to the site offended him.
The president’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., suffered a heart attack at 42 and died in 1981; his son is Fred Trump III, 63. Writing from the account @FredTrump_, he opened by explaining the timing: two reports touching on the 9/11 tragedy had come out that day, and he would address them at once because doing 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,” read the post, which kept his own spelling. Years of public criticism preceded it: Fred Trump III has been going after his uncle since his memoir appeared in 2024, “All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way,” a book alleging that his uncle said his severely disabled son should die and describing a scheme to cut him out of the family fortune.
What the President Has Said
Trump, 80, kept coming back to the subject before the anniversary. 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.” Tunnel to Towers built its Steel Across America event on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., around a beam from the South Tower, and there, on Tuesday, September 8, he described his evacuation from the U.S. Steel Building, a tower now called One Liberty Plaza.
“The United States Steel building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down,” he said. Two firefighters, he went on, 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’s Point-by-Point Rebuttal
A large building in New York City was going up under him, the president said in both appearances, when attackers struck the World Trade Center. Trump World Tower, on United Nations Plaza in Midtown, was the tower under construction at the time.
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).”
He took issue with the near-collapse story as well. 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.”
An Account That Has Shifted
The president’s telling has changed over the years. He said at first that he had dispatched dozens of construction workers to the site. By the 2016 campaign, firefighters had entered the story, hustling him out of the U.S. Steel Building after it started creaking in the days that followed the attacks. A further detail arrived by 2021, when he said 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 counted his own workforce at the site as more than 100 construction workers, with about 125 more due to arrive. He was at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue when the towers were struck, four miles away from the trade center site and the same distance from the U.S. Steel Building.
Photographs and video circulating since then place him downtown twice in 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.
The White House Response
Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, said the president “was relaying his experience of a city reeling immediately after and in the days and weeks after the horrific attacks.” He called press scrutiny of it “a disgrace” and pointed to how little the public trusts the media. No supporting material for the president’s version came from the White House. Asked about it by reporters, Trump called his account “exactly accurate.”
A Second Post About Rudy Giuliani
Fred Trump III posted again on Wednesday morning, September 9, this time about 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. Religion, he argued, lay behind that objection, and he pointed to what President George W. Bush declared after the attacks: “Islam is peace.” The full post remains unpublished by any outlet.
What Happened on the Anniversary
A death toll of 2,977 people came out of the attacks. The Ground Zero ceremony on Friday, September 11, went ahead without Trump, who marked the day at the Pentagon with First Lady Melania Trump as 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.
Nothing further has come from the nephew in the week since — no follow-up post, no interview, no reply from Giuliani. The president did revisit the ceremony on September 13, attacking Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., over a clip of the two smiling during the roll call. “It’s not a place to be laughing,” he said.