The hosts of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” skewered President Trump on Wednesday over his latest debunked claims about his whereabouts during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City, labeling his behavior “as low as it gets.”
During a Tuesday speech, Trump said that he went to Lower Manhattan in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and that two firefighters physically carried him to safety when they thought a nearby building was going to collapse. As “Morning Joe” co-host Willie Geist noted on Wednesday, Trump was infamously in Midtown Manhattan during the Sept. 11 attacks and called into a local radio station at the time.
“He called into Channel 9 WWOR, was talking through it for 45 minutes and said, ‘Well, now my building, 40 Wall Street, is the tallest in Lower Manhattan,’” Geist recapped. “That was his immediate reaction to the story.” Co-host Mika Brzezinski, meanwhile, told “Morning Joe” viewers that “there is no evidence supporting the account” that Trump was carried away from a building by two firefighters on Sept. 11.
“I can’t imagine making up stuff about it. That is as low as it gets,” Brzezinski later commented. “That’s needy.” You can watch the full “Morning Joe” segment yourself in the video below.
“Morning Joe” panelist and The Bulwark managing editor Sam Stein also joined Brzezinski and Geist in slamming the president over his latest 9/11 claims.
“What is he talking about here? How did this happen? I would love some photographic or video evidence,” Stein said. “It’s kind of blasphemous in a way, right? It’s very on brand, of course, to put himself as the central character in this tragic event. But he’s done this for years and there’s just no evidence to substantiate the claims.”
“He did go down to the site afterwards. There’s definitely video evidence of that. But to add on these flourishes that the building was about to collapse and these two guys had to lift him up and run him out of there, it’s so unnecessary,” he added. “It really is, frankly, demeaning to the people who were there, who did die, who did flee for their safety.”
“The fact that he doesn’t know that, the fact that he can’t comprehend that, or maybe he does and he still tells these fibs anyway, it really says a lot about the guy,” Stein concluded. His sentiments were later echoed by “Morning Joe” co-anchor Jonathan Lemire.
“It is hard to believe [it has been] 25 years [since 9/11],” Lemire observed. “It is not hard to believe, sadly, that President Trump would try to make himself part of the story in a way that was simply not true.”
