The unexpected show of decorum turned out to be a rare departure for Trump, who has a history of using the Sept. 11 attacks to make political points, either by trying to burnish his own reputation or by damaging others’.
The most recent example came last week, when Trump circulated a video on Twitter to escalate his political attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar, the first-term Democrat of Minnesota who is also one of the first Muslim women to serve in Congress.
— Using Sept. 11 to attack Rep. Ilhan Omar
Trump posted a 43-second video that interspersed a snippet of speech from Omar alongside footage of the Sept. 11 attacks. His intent was to criticize what he apparently perceived as dismissive comments about the attack made by the congresswoman.
The tweet was shared widely by Trump’s supporters, who believe the words that Omar used to describe the attacks — “some people did something” — minimized the tragedy.
The video, in which Omar’s words are smash cut with pictures of the World Trade Center on fire, drew condemnation from her supporters; they accused the president of using a small portion of a speech on civil rights to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an anti-discrimination group, to foment xenophobia and an anti-Muslim sentiment.
Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, was among several presidential hopefuls who criticized Trump’s tweet; he accused the president of being “irresponsible for invoking 9/11 for political gain.”
“It’s un-American to its core because his whole goal is to divide us,” Ryan wrote on Twitter. “We deserve better than this from the most powerful office in the world.”
— ‘Many people jumped. And I witnessed it.’
On the presidential campaign trail, Trump asserted that he had a crow’s nest view of the attacks on the World Trade Center, saying that he had a window in his apartment that “was specifically aimed at the World Trade Center.” And from that window, Trump said he “watched those people jump, and I watched the second plane hit.”
At the time, Trump lived at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan, about 4 miles from the Trade Center. Rick Reilly, the sports journalist whose book, “Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump,” is due in May, said that the president claimed to have used a telescope. “I once looked through his telescope in his Trump Tower apartment that looked downtown,” Reilly wrote on Twitter. “He said, ‘I saw the towers come down through that telescope.’ I lifted my head up. ‘Oh my god,’ I gasped. ‘Solid gold,’ he said.”
— 40 Wall St.: ‘And now it’s the tallest.’
The landmark 72-story tower, 40 Wall St., is commonly known as the Trump Building. After the terrorist attacks, Trump applied for and received $150,000 from a New York state recovery fund for small businesses. (Though Trump owns a business empire, he was eligible because the Trump-owned entity controlling 40 Wall St. had fewer than 500 employees, according to reports.)
Trump has said the money was an automatic reimbursement for housing volunteers and emergency personnel who responded to the devastation.
But the application filed with the Empire State Development Corp., which operated the fund, was for cleanup, repair and loss of rental income, according to a New York Daily News investigation. The day of the attacks, Trump said his building, about seven blocks from where the Trade Center stood, was unscathed.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat from New York City who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, went so far Sunday as to say Trump “stole” the funds. The 40 Wall St. episode, Nadler said on CNN, shortly after the video of Omar was shared, undermined the president's condemnation of her.
“He has no moral authority to be talking about 9/11 at all,” Nadler said.
The building also came up during a television interview with Trump on Sept. 11, 2001.
“40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest — and then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest,” Trump said on WWOR-TV. “And now it’s the tallest.” That claim was not accurate.
— ‘Thousands of people were cheering’
Perhaps Trump’s most incendiary use of the terrorist attacks as a political point was made at a campaign rally in Birmingham, Alabama, in 2015.
Trump, then a presidential candidate, told supporters that on the day of the attack, in Jersey City, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, “thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.”
Trump said the celebrants were Muslim. Trump continued to use the talking point throughout his campaign, even as reports of such celebrations were repeatedly debunked.
Pointing to reporting from The Washington Post in 2001 that said the police had looked into allegations of celebrations, Trump expressed vindication, and mocked the physical disability of a Post reporter whom he said corroborated his belief. (The reporter, Serge F. Kovaleski, now works for The New York Times.)
— Sept. 11 and the presidency
In 2017, Trump signed into law an expansion of a 2001 act that created a medal of valor for 9/11 first responders, widening the scope of who was eligible for the award.
But the next year, the president’s proposed 2019 budget included restructuring the National Institutes of Health, a move that would have dried up some funding for health-related claims by people affected by the attacks.
After vociferous outcry from victims and lawmakers (a cause also picked up by comic and talk show host Jon Stewart), the plan was scrapped.
In February, the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund announced it was running out of money and would have to slash payouts for new claimants by up to 70 percent, leading to calls for its renewal. The fund, which was almost quashed in 2011 by Republicans, is set to terminate in 2020.
— Commemorating Sept. 11
In the weeks after the attacks, Trump appeared on the Howard Stern Show and pledged a $10,000 charitable donation to the Twin Towers Fund. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump made references to his Sept. 11 donations and to other efforts to help out at ground zero.
But in October 2016, Scott M. Stringer, the New York City comptroller, found no donation made by Trump to that charity in the 12-month period following the on-air pledge.
As president, Trump has been in office for two anniversaries of the event. In 2017, he marked the occasion at the Pentagon in a somber memorial. “On that day, not only did the world change, but we all changed,” Trump said at the time. “Our differences never looked so small, our common bonds never felt so strong.”
Last year, Trump visited the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania, the site where passengers brought down a plane hijacked by terrorists on Sept. 11. “This field is now a monument to American defiance,” he said at the ceremony. “America will never, ever submit to tyranny.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.