We already knew, before President Trump began his Tuesday morning speech commemorating 9/11, that he wasn’t going to visit New York. He doesn’t intend to travel to Ground Zero to stand alongside every other living U.S. president on Friday, where solemnity is expected and speeches aren’t allowed. Because rules be damned: Donald J. Trump was going to make a speech about that day, and that was that.
So today, in front of a 21-foot steel beam salvaged from the wreckage of the World Trade Center and transported to the Ellipse in front of the White House, he showed us what he talks about when he talks about Sept. 11, 2001.
Trump opened by welcoming the crowd to “one of the safest cities in the country,” which “was one of the unsafest” but is now cleaner and better, thanks to him. He then talked unironically about DC’s “monuments, statues and fountains” looking especially good, before meandering his way to the actual tragedy of 9/11.
Reading haltingly off a piece of paper, the president then threw a couple of pre-prepared lines out about a day “etched forever into the memories of Americans.” Then, he pivoted immediately to Iran, or “a certain nation that wanted a nuclear weapon”. In case anyone had missed that oblique reference, he added: “Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” and stopped for applause. The crowd obliged.
“We’ve punished them greatly, as you know,” he continued. “We’ve really taken it to them. Nobody thought it could go so well.” It was the first of a number of deeply unsettling moments.
The next was when the president attempted to tell a story about Howard Lutnick, the current Secretary of Commerce and former CEO of the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald. Cantor Fitzgerald — which was based in the top three floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center in 2001 — lost almost 700 employees in the September 11th attacks, and Lutnick avoided the same fate only because he’d taken his son to school that morning.
Or, as Trump put it, “his wife would always be screaming at him: You never take our child to school,” so “after four years, he did” though “he wasn’t happy about it.” Because of that singular school dropoff, Lutnick ended up elsewhere in Manhattan, watching the planes hit the towers where he worked — “he got to see it,” as Trump told it — and so, the president mused, “you could say he owes a lot to his son and to his wife.” The thing we ought to understand, he added, is that “Cantor Fitzgerald was so hot” at the time, and after “they all died,” Lutnick had to “start the firm all over again.”
By the way, he concluded, “the firm is now bigger, stronger, better” than it was before.
It’s a classic Trumpian narrative arc: something bad or inconvenient happened, a big businessman came in and rebuilt it, and everything is even better than it ever could have been before anyway, thanks to that man’s grit and acumen. Except this time, the bad and inconvenient thing that happened was the untimely deaths of 683 people, who likely didn’t care that Cantor Fitzgerald was “so hot” when they realized they’d never see their families again. The human tragedy of their fear and terror and the grief and loss felt by their loved ones hung in the background as the president focused solely on the miraculous escape of one man, who happens to be in his Cabinet.
Then came a vintage Trump 9/11 story, which nobody has ever verified: a claim that he was present at a construction site next door to the World Trade Center on the day after the planes hit the towers, and that a firefighter “lifted me up and started running with me” because they thought the building was going to come down. He chuckled as he recounted this, adding a few times that it’s hard to carry a man as big as him. Then he moved on to congratulating New York (at this point I think many of us believed he was going to say “for its courage,” or “for its dedication to pulling together in a terrible moment,” or “for its spirit”) for its excellent “demolition crews” who worked to clear away the rubble.
There was a quick aside about first responders and their bravery, in which Trump sought to underline repeatedly that “they knew what they were getting into” and “they knew what was going to happen” when they started rescue attempts. He segued from this straight into the importance of “law enforcement” and law and order in general, adding that “other people want to go another way, they want to go a communistic way. That’s not gonna happen.” The less said about that, really, the better.
Trump then informed us that he recently secured a “brand new beautiful” coastguard cutter for the city (“I bought it myself, I negotiated the price, it was very expensive”.) The cutter is going to be named after Firefighter Jeffrey Palazzo, who died on 9/11, and so, Trump added, “I didn’t want to negotiate too hard” because of his memory. A class act, truly.
The president moved to introduce Alison Crowther, mother of the 9/11 hero Welles Crowther, who was working as an equities trader in the World Trade Center on the 104th floor on September 11th and who guided people to safety before perishing himself. Welles, a trained volunteer firefighter in his hometown, came to be known as “the man with the red bandana” by those who made it out alive and were helped by him.
Alison Crowther stood and thanked Trump for inviting her to speak Tuesday, adding that Welles’ legacy was about being “better, kinder and more compassionate,” and urging people to “choose courage, compassion and service.” The president, in contrast, had described Welles a few minutes earlier as “the man in the red bandana [who] has become more famous than me,” adding with a laugh, “I don’t like it.”
The president’s final words, spoken after Crowther, were that “our country is bigger, better, stronger than before.” And with that, he wandered offstage in his big, white ‘USA’ hat, neatly proving why nobody will miss him at Ground Zero on the actual anniversary.
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