President Donald Trump is expressing outrage now about 9/11 through a controversial attempt to use the tragedy to slam Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), but his grief wasn’t quite so obvious right after the terrorist attacks. At the time, Trump gloated that his building at 40 Wall St. had become the tallest in New York City with the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.
Not only was the statement appallingly insensitive, but it was also a lie, former Democratic political strategist and CNN political contributor Paul Begala told Chris Cuomo on Friday.
“This guy has no moral standing ever to try to use our greatest day of national pain for his political gain,” Begala said.
He was responding to a video Trump posted Friday on Twitter that juxtaposed comments by Omar, a Muslim, with footage of the 9/11 attacks. Trump tweeted: “WE WILL NEVER FORGET!”
But Begala recalled Trump’s reaction the morning of the attack: It was all about himself.
“Before the bodies had been cleared or identified, before the wounded had been treated, [Trump] went on television ... and he said: ‘Well, my building at 40 Wall Street is now the tallest building in America,’” Begala recalled. “He bragged about it; it wasn’t true. And it was appallingly bad taste.” (Hear Begala’s comments at 3:12 in the video above.)
Trump said via phone to WWOR in New Jersey that “40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan. And it was actually before the World Trade Center ... the tallest. And then when they built the World Trade Center, it actually became known as the second tallest, and now it’s the tallest.”
Since the president is tweeting out 9/11 footage, here’s a clip of him *ON* 9/11 talking about how now he owned the tallest building in the area since the towers fell. pic.twitter.com/BM403PspDi — Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) April 12, 2019
Begala added that Trump also “spread a lie that Muslims” in New Jersey were “dancing and partying and celebrating” the terrorist attacks.
It’s “obscene for the president to try to take that pain and make political gain from it,” said Begala. “I had problems with some of the things that Congresswoman Omar has said .... It was outrageous, and she has apologized. President Trump needs to apologize for this.”
Check out the full discussion above.
Trump has a strange history with 9/11, including a false boast that he helped pay people to clear rubble at the site and search for survivors.
Maggie_A on April 13rd, 2019 at 17:04 UTC »
Feel free to post and share this...
Reminder that's coming from Donald Trump. This is Trump's 9/11 record. And it's on the record that....
1. On 9/11 itself Trump was on the phone with a TV station hours after the buildings collapsed bragging about how his building was now the tallest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ASRlzeLg0U
2. Trump promised to donate $10,000 to the 9/11 victims. (A paltry amount for a New Yorker who claimed to be a billionaire and one of the richest men in the country) But he never donated the money....though he took public credit for donating it.
3. Trump lied and claimed he had hundreds of his men working in the 9/11 rescue effort when he didn't have any.
4. Trump lied and claimed that he helped in the 9/11 clean-up personally.
All Trump did was show up and get himself interviewed on TV at the site. He didn't get his hands dirty.
5. Trump lied repeatedly about 9/11 claiming to have seen thousands of Muslims cheering in New Jersey when the Towers fell....something that never happened.
6. Trump lied and said he watched people jump from the windows on 9/11
7. Trump lied and said he lost hundreds of friends in the 9/11 attack. But he can't name a single one. You lost someone in that attack, you remember their names.
8. Trump did make money off 9/11 though he lied repeatedly about the reason why he was given that money. The billionaire, one of the richest men in America, applied for and got a small business grant of $150,000. (15 times more than he was willing to pledge [but not pay] to the victims' fund.)
Trump lied and said the money was reimbursement for helping out after the attacks, it wasn't.
9. Finally, in 2016, 15 years after 9/11 happened and in the middle of his presidential campaign, Trump finally does something for 9/11 (that isn't being a lying, greedy piece of shit). He has his Trump Foundation donate $100,000 to the 9/11 Museum Memorial days before the New York primary. But understand, that wasn't Trump's own money. He hadn't given a dime to his Foundation in years. So Trump donated $100,000 of other people's money to the 9/11 Museum.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/trump-charity-donations/
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/275748-trump-donates-100k-to-9-11-memorial
To date, Trump hasn't given a penny of his own money for the 9/11 victims. Donald Trump has been such a piece of shit over 9/11, it boggles the mind that any American who was alive then would support him.
Skiinz19 on April 13rd, 2019 at 14:54 UTC »
This was known before the election. People still voted for him.
lobsterbash on April 13rd, 2019 at 14:25 UTC »
He's an unbelievably terrible human being who takes his cues on how to appear outraged and caring from his propaganda machine. But here's a glimpse of Trump in his true form, before he had his current luxury: