Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz has come to the defense of President Donald Trump after he was accused of inventing a story about being hauled away from an unsafe structure by firefighters in the wake of 9/11.
The president delivered a speech on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., Tuesday in which he recounted an anecdote about witnessing the United States Steel Building in Manhattan “creaking” days after the infamous terror attack on the World Trade Center, the 25th anniversary of which will be observed Friday.
Trump said he was ushered to safety by “two firemen, big, strong guys,” who “grabbed me under the arm, said, ‘Got to get out of here!’”
“They literally lifted me up,” he continued. “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.”
The president has told versions of the same story at least twice before – in 2016 and 2021 – despite there being no evidence of it having really happened, prompting CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins to ask Cruz about it on The Source Wednesday.
“September 11 was 25 years ago,” the senator responded. “It was a horrific moment for our entire country.
“And you can doubt whatever you want about Donald Trump but the man is a New Yorker, he loves New York, and I have every [sic] doubt that what he’s conveying there is what he experienced and it was a traumatic experience for all of us.”
Among those scorning Cruz’s defense was leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who tweeted: “ted cruz once famously was caught watching porn on this website on 9/11 so i’m not surprised this is his defense for trump.”
Piker was alluding to the senator’s official account notoriously liking a two-minute clip from an adult film that was posted on Twitter by “SexuallPosts” on September 11, 2017, a blunder subsequently blamed on an unnamed staffer.
“If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything,” observed chess champion Garry Kasparov.
“There is a genuine competition for which Republican has most debased himself in service to Trump,” said The Bulwark’s founder Sarah Longwell. “But I think it’s Ted Cruz with a bullet.”
Others derided the senator as a “bootlicker,” a “coward,” a “suck-up” and a “disgrace” for again standing up for a man who publicly insulted his wife when they were rivals for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016.
The president angrily defended his remarks in a lengthy Truth Social post late Tuesday, attacking New York Magazine and New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman for questioning his record on 9/11 and his decision not to return to the Big Apple for the anniversary commemorations.
Rather than join his four presidential predecessors – Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden – to pay his respects at Ground Zero, Trump will be at the Pentagon in D.C. instead.
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