The unsolved mystery behind Trump's newest whopper

Donald Trump has told stories for years about his own role in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack on 9/11 that could not be substantiated—and one can only conclude were lies—trying to weave himself more forcefully into that day.

Now he has added an extraordinary new level of detail to one of those tales, claiming in a speech at a 911/ tribute this week that he was near Ground Zero and in harm’s way as a building appeared to be coming down, with two firefighters grabbing him on both sides, lifting him up and running with him to safety.

This is completely deranged. Does Trump really believe this increasingly elaborate story, for which there is no known corroboration—and which surely would have been quite a story for the firefighters in question to tell?

If he does believe it, it raises serious questions about his cognitive state. And if he doesn’t believe it, well, it is yet another complete and knowing fabrication by Trump.

If Joe Biden suddenly told a new, elaborate story about his role in the aftermath of 9/11, the media would surely be asking questions about either cognitive decline or outrageous lying.

But I could not believe The New York Times’ treatment of Trump’s claim—burying it on their homepage—including describing it as among the “questionable” and “provocative” things Trump has said about 9/11. “Questionable” and “provocative”? Again, is that how such an extraordinary, apparently unsubstantiated autobiographical tale would be characterized if Biden—or any other president—told it?

Surely there would be attempts to find the firefighters in question and serious reporting aimed at corroborating the story. The White House has defended Trump since the story was challenged, but has offered no evidence identifying the firefighters or substantiating the specific episode he described. That leaves the central question unanswered: Was the president knowingly fabricating the story, or does he actually believe it happened?Questions should be asked about his cognitive state—as we saw over and over with Biden, and often quite aggressively by The New York Times. And it’s not as if there hasn’t been reporting about Trump’s age and cognition. The Times itself has examined how Trump has changed as he’s aged, documenting increasingly long and unfocused speeches, confusion and memory lapses, while raising questions about what those changes might mean.

So it’s not like they’d be breaking new ground. And yet, the Times, like much of the rest of the media, didn’t see this 9/11 tale as possibly more evidence of Trump’s mental decline, and instead went back to the kind of reporting in which they grade Trump on a curve. They expect him to engage in lies, so they just sort of accept it. It’s almost as if they forget that they themselves have looked seriously at questions about his cognitive state.

And because Trump has long claimed that he brought more than 100 workers to Ground Zero in the days after the attack to help with the recovery—something that has never been substantiated, with a former FDNY battalion chief saying he knew of neither Trump nor such a crew—reporters seem to just graft this new story onto the larger collection of claims that keeps evolving.

But this story is not something small. It’s an extraordinary claim about something so dear to millions of Americans. If it’s not an example of cognitive impairment—if he doesn’t actually believe it and is simply fabricating the story—it’s a gargantuan lie. As one caller to my SiriusXM program put it, it’s “stolen valor”: an attempt to place himself among the heroes of 9/11, and now as someone whose own life was supposedly in jeopardy from a falling building.

And it’s being told by the current president of the United States. That makes the truth of it inherently consequential. Where are the firefighters? Where are the witnesses? What do New York officials and first responders who were there remember? And if the story cannot be corroborated, the obvious question remains: Is the president knowingly telling a false story, or does he believe this happened to him?

Instead, it’s put in the category of “provocative” claims—language that treats an extraordinary, unsubstantiated autobiographical claim by a sitting president as a another sideshow rather than something demanding an answer.