The worst day ever. A day where even Howard Stern went into News mode and stopped all on air humor. By 10 am the entire national character was changed forever.
The Donald’s Self Centered 9-11 Lies
What didn’t change that day was Donald Trump’s penchant for self centered grandiose lying. The buildings had just fallen when he started off a blue streak of horrible lies that continues to this day. The only person who had a 9-11 as emotionally fulfilling as Trump would be Osama bin-Laden.
And every 9-11 since Trump has refreshed and updated his lies. Always bigger than the previous years. The lies have really piled up. Eventually he presented himself falsely as prominently featuring in the recovery efforts by supplying labor and equipment. It’s untrue.
Remember just how badly he screwed the pooch last 9-11? A day where he acted a little worse every hour?
The fact is the president is simply plain old bad with serious things, especially death. Be it the death of a military hero, the death of a rival politician, the death of an average citizen, you name it. He’s made inappropriate comments about all of it. He always speaks horribly and never offers anything in the way of comfort (unless you count violent retribution).
Failing to show any compassion in the face of national tragedies has been Trump’s True North. Be it defending Nazis, disappearing completely when gun violence by angry right wingers unfolds, trashing the late John McCain or making grandiose false claims in the face of bigger tragedies, like the Hurricane that he won’t admit devastated Puerto Rico. Trump’s been a total bust in a role where the nation used to look to get a few sober words of encouragement from their leaders.
In New York Trump was already old news by 9-11 and no one was overly surprised he said outrageous hard to believe things. Mostly no one noticed because everyone except Trump and Giuliani were emotionally overwhelmed and not reading Page 6 to see Trump’s crazy claims. So some of his worst remarks were shot into the dark, luckily for him. But not all, people noticed. Trump’s vulgar personality was well known.
The things Trump has done and said revolving around 9-11 have been just plain disgusting. He started off immediately, gloating THAT DAY. As the fire raged he falsely claimed he now had the biggest building in Manhattan. Later came the delusions that he saw people falling from the building from his vantage point 4 miles away. Most obnoxious of all was maybe the lie about seeing “thousands of arabs dancing on the rooftops celebrating” when the buildings fell. This last lie seems to have no bottom and lead to some deep lows through the campaign and beyond. More on this whopper of a falsehood later.
Shamelessly taking 150K in Federal Aid he probably didn’t deserve and definitely didn’t need was the first thing he did when the dust started to settle.
Needless to say there was no aspect of 9-11 Donald Trump didn’t personally appropriate. he was the biggest victim if he’s to be believed as far as personal loss goes. Notably saying “I lost hundreds of friends” on 9-11. It’s almost laughable if it wasn’t so serious. It would mean Trump knew about one out of every ten people who died in the Towers.
Does anyone believe he ever had hundreds of friends to begin with? How many friends do you have? How many of them work in the same quarter-mile area? Yeah it was downtown Manhattan, but being friends with ‘hundreds of people” in just the Towers? This is BEFORE Facebook changed the definition of friend. There was virtually no social media yet. So anyone having ‘hundreds of friends’ in 2001 seems a stretch anyway.
So the idea you could have “hundreds of friends” who died on 9-11? Is this even true of anyone outside say the pretzel vender who had the stand outside the buildings? That’s about like as likely as having both your children become left-handed starting pitchers for the Yankees the same season kind of a long shot. It’s a damned lie.
The biggest lies Trump has uncorked about 9-11 have mostly been about seeing that aforementioned imaginary ‘massive’ celebration of arabs ‘dancing in the streets and rooftops’ of Newark when the Towers fell. This is the claim that lead him to famously mock the disabled reporter who tried to clarify the tale, which was reported as an unverifiable rumor and NEVER involved ‘thousands’ of people.
It seems to never have happened. There’s never been any footage or pictures of it. It was just a random thing Trump happened to remember that was never really true. It was in with all the other misinformation like the car-bomb that wasn’t on the 59th Street Bridge or the pipe-bombs in the subway that were just abandoned suitcases. In other words; it was one of the misconceptions and wild rumors that flew around in the ether that day.
It’s a story only in the papers that were put together by dazed survivors who had been in proximity of the Attacks, later on 9-11 (as limited a run as those papers were). Facts were few and far between for about a week. New York papers did some of their best and worst work at the same time. It was followed up but the reporter could never verify it. There were rumors all over the place. This one ends up being the most toxic, but not for a really long time as Trump doesn’t recall or speak of it for 14 years.
Maybe the most notable thing about this racist lie, he’s first recorded uttering in 2015, is that its the first time we know of that he ever sees a large crowd that isn’t there.
Could these are some of the same imaginary people he saw at his inauguration? That particular shindig, which Trump’s lied non stop about, sometimes claiming it was “a million people”, had far less than a third as many people at it as President Obama turned out in 2009, where it really was close to TWO MILLION people on hand in the moment in DC. So it’s a notable first as far as outright hallucinations the ‘president’ occasionally has.
Back to Trump’s extraordinary claim. I personally refute it based on the fact I lived through the same events here in the New York City area and can tell you it absolutely would have ended in murder if you tried to be happy and start dancing the day 9-11 happened. It wouldn’t have been something only one person ever saw. The people who did something like that would have been jailed for inciting a riot the moment such behavior began if someone didn’t simply attack them first.
Anyone who had attempted to dance and celebrate on 9-11 would have been physically attacked, possibly killed and the killers would have gotten Community Service on 9-11. Where’s the police records? Where’s the Emergency Room records? Where are the court records for the crimes this would have sparked. Where’s even one other witness to this massive display?
The Bully in the Bully Pulpit resurrects this day far too often. And always for far too little. In this case it’s just his mean-spirited nature can’t miss a chance to attack a minority female and its wrapped up in 9-11 to disguise his attack. I feel like it comes off as part of his whole hatred of women and minorities more than anything else.
The day of 9-11 was horrifying and wouldn’t end. Only Trump found a way to celebrate that day. Trump knows an ignorant cottage industry sprung up around 9-11 and when he lies about it it’s just a mentally ill guy looking to create other mentally ill people to hang out with.
It’s strange that History will have no choice but to call Trump “a powerful, seductive voice” but it just will. He’s led Marine Generals and captains of Industry off of cliffs. And still they keep falling in line to fall of that cliff. It’s plain old hard to fathom how anyone finds him well spoken or compelling enough for the label to fit but it is what it is.
Trump Vs Omar
Right now we have a lot of anger being stoked by Trump taking some out of context quotes from Rep Ihan Omar, who isn’t the best speaker, and trying to make it into an endorsement of the Attacks. Honestly the twitter meme Trump sent out was pretty low and creepy and fits with the idea he’s working with Putin to divide Americans.
The out of context audio clip by Omar was bad and dishonest enough without looping it and juxtaposing it with the worst moments of 9-11. Like 7 times in a row. Ihan Omar, elected from the sae state that gave us Michele Bachmann, is something of a poorly spoken novice as a freshman House of Representatives member from Minnesota. While she may need charm school she seems to have only said true things in a way that some people have either been offended by or opted to seize on. It’s not too hard to make her look bad. This was a bridge too far to start with. Its also just a pretty flimsy pretext to send a message straight out of the Third Reich as far as hatefulness. Way too eager to be a creep there.
When it comes to 9-11 I’m a lot less prone to be upset or offended by someone understating the whole thing than I do with a person who misappropriates it and co-opts it to advance their own egotistical designs.
So the real Trolls of 9-11 have always been Donald Trump and Ann Coulter, not necessarily in that order at any given time, but really, no one’s said anything that comes close to what these two have said.
