Fred Trump III, President Donald Trump’s nephew, went on X on Tuesday evening, September 8, 2026, to dispute the president’s account of pitching in at Ground Zero after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, saying his uncle’s claim that he brought a crew of workers downtown offended him.
The president’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., fathered Fred Trump III, 63; a heart attack at 42 killed the elder brother in 1981. Writing from the account @FredTrump_, he used the top of the post to explain his timing: two reports touching on the 9/11 tragedy had come out that day, and he said he would deal with them immediately because doing so “on the 25th anniversary this Friday would take away from the solemn memories.”
“I try not to comment personally about my uncle, but his claim that he brought a crew of workers to help at the sight so offends me that I need to speak out,” he wrote, in his own spelling.
The family rift is years old. Fred Trump III began criticizing his uncle in public with the 2024 publication of his memoir, “All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way.” In it he alleged that his uncle said his severely disabled son should die. A scheme to cut him out of the family fortune took up another part of the book.
What the President Has Said
As the anniversary approached, the story kept resurfacing in the telling of Trump, 80. Appearing on “Sunday Night in America with Trey Gowdy” on September 6, he said he went down to the site “the following day” and that “we worked long and hard.” A Tunnel to Towers commemoration built around a beam from the South Tower — the Steel Across America event on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, September 8 — drew from him an account of being evacuated from the U.S. Steel Building, now called One Liberty Plaza.
“The United States Steel building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down,” he said. Two firefighters then carried him off, he went on: “They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself,’ but they were amazing.”
The Nephew’s Point-by-Point Rebuttal
In both of those appearances, the president said he was in the middle of putting up a large building in New York City when the World Trade Center was struck. The tower under construction at the time was Trump World Tower, on United Nations Plaza in Midtown.
Any crew his uncle claimed to have taken downtown, Fred Trump III wrote, would have consisted of secretarial and accounting staff from Trump Tower. He said he knew many of them and was “pretty sure they were not capable physically to help (if they could, I am sure they would try).”
The near-collapse story drew a rebuttal, too. A close friend’s grandfather had been one of the U.S. Steel Building’s original engineers, he wrote, and “the bldg was built strong.” An engineer — the brother of one of his partners — was called in immediately to inspect it, he said, and despite the early alarm the building “was eventually cleared for occupancy — not creaking and ready to fall.”
An Account That Has Shifted
Over the years the president’s telling has moved. His earliest version had him dispatching dozens of construction workers to the site. Firefighters entered the story by the 2016 campaign, hustling him out of the U.S. Steel Building after it started creaking in the days that followed the attacks. He was saying by 2021 that he had been physically lifted away from the scene.
Two days after the towers fell, standing several blocks from the wreckage, Trump told the German broadcaster N24 that he had more than 100 construction workers at the site, with about 125 more due to arrive. He was at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan when the towers were struck, a spot that sits four miles away from the trade center site and the U.S. Steel Building alike.
Photographs and video circulating since place him downtown twice over the following weeks, in the Wall Street area both times rather than on the pile. An NBC interview carries a time stamp of September 13, 2001, and a set of Getty Images pictures is dated September 18.
The White House Response
Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, said the president “was relaying his experience of a city reeling immediately after and in the days and weeks after the horrific attacks.” He called press scrutiny of it “a disgrace” and cited low public trust in the media. Nothing supporting the president’s version came from the White House. Trump told reporters his account was “exactly accurate.”
A Second Post About Rudy Giuliani
Fred Trump III posted again on Wednesday morning, September 9, turning to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, he wrote, “said he would attend memorial services as is his right,” and Giuliani said soon afterward that “he was offended by Mamdani’s” attendance. He then cast that objection as religious, invoking President George W. Bush’s declaration after the attacks that “Islam is peace.” The full post remains unpublished by any outlet.
What Happened on the Anniversary
Some 2,977 people died in the attacks. Rather than attend the Ground Zero ceremony on Friday, September 11, Trump marked the day at the Pentagon with First Lady Melania Trump, sending Vice President JD Vance to represent the administration in Lower Manhattan. Mamdani did attend, and he and Giuliani shook hands on arrival before sitting together for the reading of the names.
The nephew has said nothing more. In the week since, Fred Trump III has not revisited the subject, sat for an interview or drawn a reply from Giuliani. A clip of the two smiling during the roll call brought the president back to the ceremony on September 13, when he attacked Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. “It’s not a place to be laughing,” he said.