Donald Trump talked to reporters near Ground Zero two days after the Twin Towers were attacked, unearthed archival footage from PBS News shows.
Watch the clip from 2001 in the video player above.
In a video shot by a crew for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on Sept. 13, 2001, Trump, then a real estate developer, said he was there to check on his construction crew.
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“It’s just terrible. I can’t get anywhere. Something I’ve never seen before,” Trump said of the scene. “And dangerous. We have a lot of buildings still in a form of collapse, so it’s very dangerous and it’s tough.”
Trump was having a building constructed in New York City at the time, which he said was “OK” after the attack. He told reporters that he had about 100 workers helping to dig out rubble at the World Trade Center, and another 100 to 150 were “coming.”
At an event this week paying tribute to fallen heroes of 9/11, now-President Trump spoke about his experience visiting the site of the New York attacks.
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“I was building a big building in New York and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened and they had no hesitation. Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. It wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest. It was raw. Nobody’s seen anything like it ever,” Trump said on Sept. 8, 2026, at a ceremony near the White House.
He has shared the story about sending workers to the scene to aid in the recovery more than once over the years. Our partners at PolitiFact worked to fact-check his claims, and they were unable to verify that he brought hundreds of workers to help with “digging out.”
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The NewsHour footage does not appear to show anyone from a Trump construction crew.
In the 2001 video, when asked for his opinion as a developer about the prospect of repairing the damage, Trump said “you can do anything nowadays with the right money and the right talent” and that he thought the city would be rebuilt in “maybe not the same form, but in some form.”
“It’s going to take a long time, but they’re tough. New Yorkers are tough,” he said. “The country is tough. And hopefully we’ll — there’ll be great retribution.”
