and this: However, in an April 2019 tweet, sports columnist Rick Reilly said he once visited Trump Tower and looked through a telescope aimed at Downtown Manhattan. He said Trump told him, “I saw the towers come down thr[ough] that telescope.” AD

“Oh, my God,” Reilly said he responded, to which Trump said, “Solid gold.”

I once looked thru his telescope in his Trump Tower apt. that looked downtown. He said, "I saw the towers come down thru that telescope." I lifted my head up. "Oh my god," I gasped.
"Solid gold," he said.#Narcissist
— Rick Reilly (@ReillyRick) April 12, 2019

There is one thing we do know for certain about Trump’s whereabouts 18 years ago. In the afternoon, producers for WWOR in Secaucus, N.J., were desperate to broadcast something besides a loop of the planes hitting the towers. As The Washington Post’s Timothy Bella reported last year, one of them thought to get a celebrity on the phone for an interview, and soon after, they reached Trump on his private penthouse line.

A few minutes later, he was live on air. “I have a window that looks directly at the World Trade Center, and I saw this huge explosion,” Trump said. “Now, I’m looking at absolutely nothing. It’s just gone. It’s just hard to believe.”

Then, when asked whether his building at 40 Wall Street, several blocks from Ground Zero, had seen any damage, Trump responded: “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. And now it’s the tallest.” AD

Brenda Blackmon, who was co-anchoring, told The Post in 2018: “Any reaction I had, in the midst of everything that was happening, was, wow, that’s insensitive. It just was.”

The photo of the doomed 9/11 ‘Dust Lady’ still haunts us after all these years

So that was the day of the attacks. In the Pentagon speech Wednesday, Trump also said, “Soon after, I went down to Ground Zero with men who worked for me to try to help in any little way that we could.”

This appears to be another version of a claim Trump began making only two days after the attacks and has continued to make, without providing evidence, for years.

As The Fix’s Philip Bump