President Donald Trump’s nephew went public against him on X on Tuesday evening, September 8, 2026, disputing the president’s account of pitching in at Ground Zero after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks and saying his uncle’s claim that he brought a crew of workers to the site offended him.
The president’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., died in 1981 after a heart attack at 42. His son, Fred Trump III, 63, opened the post from the account @FredTrump_ by explaining why he was speaking up when he did: two reports touching on the 9/11 tragedy had come out that day, and he would answer them at once rather than wait, 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.
Their split is not new. Fred Trump III has criticized his uncle in public since his memoir, “All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way,” came out in 2024. In it he alleged that his uncle said his severely disabled son should die, and he described a scheme to cut him out of the family fortune.
Trump’s Version of the Day
Trump, 80, kept returning to the story as the anniversary approached. On “Sunday Night in America with Trey Gowdy” on September 6, he said he had gone down to the site “the following day” and that “we worked long and hard.” He told the Steel Across America event on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, September 8, that he had been evacuated from the U.S. Steel Building, now called One Liberty Plaza; the Tunnel to Towers commemoration was built around a beam from the South Tower.
“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.”
Point by Point, the Nephew Pushes Back
In both appearances, the president said the World Trade Center was struck while he had a large building going up in New York City. That project 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 knew many of them, he said, 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 the same treatment. 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, and despite the early alarm the building “was eventually cleared for occupancy — not creaking and ready to fall.”
A Story That Has Changed Over Time
Over the years the president has told it differently. His first version had him dispatching dozens of construction workers to the site. During the 2016 campaign he was describing firefighters hustling him out of the U.S. Steel Building after it started creaking in the days that followed the attacks. By 2021 the account included his being physically lifted away from the scene.
Two days after the towers fell, Trump spoke to the German broadcaster N24 from a spot several blocks from the wreckage and put his own workforce at the site at more than 100 construction workers, with about 125 more due to arrive. He was at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan when the towers were struck, four miles away from both the trade center site and the U.S. Steel Building.
Photographs and video that have circulated since put him downtown twice in the following weeks — in the Wall Street area both times, not on the pile. One is an NBC interview time-stamped September 13, 2001; the other is a set of Getty Images pictures dated September 18.
How the White House Responded
White House spokesman Davis Ingle 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, This One on 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.” No outlet has published the post in full.
On the Anniversary Itself
The attacks killed 2,977 people. On Friday, September 11, Trump skipped the Ground Zero ceremony and marked the day at the Pentagon with First Lady Melania Trump, while Vice President JD Vance represented the administration in Lower Manhattan. Mamdani did attend. He and Giuliani shook hands on arrival and sat together during the reading of the names.
The nephew has said nothing more. In the week since, Fred Trump III has not returned to the subject, sat for an interview or drawn a reply from Giuliani. The president did revisit the ceremony on September 13, attacking Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., over a clip of the two smiling during the roll call. “It’s not a place to be laughing,” he said.
