A graphic circulating on social media seeming to feature a quote from former American President Donald Trump claims that he said ‘there was no 9/11 attack as it was shown to us’. The graphic features a photo of Trump speaking at a podium with a lower-third text stating ‘Live: President Trump in Laconia, NH’. Let’s verify this claim through this article.
Claim: Donald Trump said that the September 11 attacks never happened as they were” shown to us.”
Fact: The photo in the viral graphic is from a speech that Donald Trump gave on 22 January 2024, at a rally in Laconia, New Hampshire. At no point in this speech does he claims that the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center never happened. His reference to this event was in the context that such attacks did not occur during his presidential term. Therefore, the claim made in the post is False.
To determine the validity of the viral claim, a search was conducted using relevant keywords to locate any mainstream media reports of Trump making such a statement. This search yielded no credible news of him claiming the 9/11 attacks never happened. Such a sweeping statement from a former president would almost certainly lead to significant media coverage, which is not the case here.
To understand the context behind this claim, we searched for the original speech from Trump at Laconia, NH, on the internet, as indicated by the text displayed in the viral graphic.
This led to the full speech(here, here and here) given by Donald Trump at a rally in Laconia, New Hampshire, on 22 January 2024. While Trump does refer to the World Trade Center attacks in this speech, he does not claim they never happened. Instead, he stressed that such attacks did not take place during his presidency.
In his speech, while criticising Nikki Haley, Trump referred to his Border wall policy. At 14: 38 timestamp in his speech, he said, ‘ You know, when I was there four years, I wanted to talk so much. We had no terrorism, we had no attacks, we had nothing,…We had the Trump travel ban, and we got the terror ban, right? We wanted to stop terror from coming into our country. But I couldn’t talk about it because I didn’t want something to happen the following day. So, I spent four years keeping my mouth shut on that particular subject. But now I talk about it all the time. We had no attacks. We didn’t have a World Trade Center. We didn’t have the attacks like you’ve seen and certainly that you see in other countries.’
This clarified that he mentioned the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks in the context of saying they did not occur during his tenure as president. His statement was taken out of context and shared as if he claimed the World Trade Center attacks never happened.
In the past, Trump has spoken about the World Trade Center attacks, as evidenced by his remarks during the September 11 Pentagon observance ceremony, which can be seen here.
To sum up, the claim that Donald Trump suggested the World Trade Center attacks never happened is False.
