The Story He Cannot Stop Telling
Two firemen. No names. No record. Twenty-five years.
The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,019: Tuesday, September 8th, 2026.
This morning, on the Ellipse, at an event honoring first responders three days before the twenty-fifth anniversary, the President of the United States told a story about himself.
He said he brought his whole construction crew downtown right after the attacks. He said the U.S. Steel Building was creaking, and everyone thought it was going to come down.
And then…he said this. Two firemen…big strong guys…grabbed him under the arms. Told him they had to get out of there. Lifted him up off the ground and ran with him.
Three hundred forty-three firefighters died in that rubble. The event was held to honor them. And the story he chose to tell…was the one where the firefighting was done for him.
I want to be careful here…so…let me get the honest part out of the way before I go any further.
What I Cannot Tell You
I cannot tell you this didn’t happen.
Nobody can. That was the most chaotic scene in modern American history, and a thousand things happened downtown that week that nobody wrote down.
I’ll go further. Outlets are already calling this a brand new claim…and that’s wrong. He told a version at a rally in 2016 and again to Newsmax in 2021. If you write that he invented it this morning…you’ll be corrected…and you’ll deserve it.
He was also, verifiably, downtown. Television crews interviewed him near the site on September 13th.
So…here’s the whole evidentiary picture. He has told this for at least ten years. He has never named the two firemen. There is no photograph, no video, no emergency record, and no first responder who has ever come forward to say he was one of the two.
Not proof of a lie. Just a decade-old story…nobody has ever been able to stand up.
What Concerns Me Isn’t The Lie
And I want to be plain about this, because the mockery is already everywhere and…for JHN…I don’t think the mockery is the point.
What concerns me is the shape of it.
Think about what you’d have to be…on the inside…to stand at a memorial for first responders and reach for a story where the responders’ courage got spent on you.
There were people actually pulled out of that rubble. Real ones. Some are still alive. There were men who died going in after them…and their widows and children are still alive too…and a lot of them…will be standing somewhere on Friday morning.
That’s whose day it is. That’s whose story the podium was built for.
He took a piece of it. Not much. Just enough for two firemen and a running start.
A memorial is one of the few places left where the whole point is that it isn’t about you. That’s the entire function. And he…cannot do it.
And It’s Growing
Here’s the part that keeps me up…thinking.
This story isn’t fading the way false memories usually do. It’s hardening. 2016. 2021. This morning. Each time with a little more detail…a little more certainty in the delivery.
That’s not how an embellishment behaves. Embellishments get quietly dropped when nobody bites. This one…is being rehearsed.
And…look at what surrounds it. On the day itself, in 2001…his documented reaction was to observe that his building…was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan.
That’s the bookend. The tallest building on the day. Carried out of the rubble twenty-five years later.
Same instinct, both times. Find the place in the disaster where he’s the subject of the sentence.
What This Actually Means
Some of you will say this is small.
A man tells a flattering story about himself. Politicians do it constantly.
But…a person who cannot leave a memorial alone…is a person who cannot subordinate himself to anything. Not to grief. Not to three hundred forty-three dead men. Not to one afternoon…that was supposed to belong to somebody else.
And a person like that…behaves the same way about a court order. About an election result. About…a war.
Same muscle. You’re just watching it work on something small enough…to see clearly.
One Thing I’m Asking
On Friday, do this.
Go find one name. Just one, out of the three hundred forty-three. Read what they did that morning…and how old they were…and who they left behind.
Then…say that name out loud, once…wherever you happen to be standing.
That’s not a gesture. That’s the correction. Every minute we spend on his story is a minute not spent on theirs…and I think he’d be perfectly happy with that trade.
Let’s not give it to him.
#HoldFast
-Jack
Jack Hopkins
P.S. Ten years of telling it, and he has never named the two men. Sit with that. If two firefighters had carried a future President out of danger on the worst day of their lives…we would know their names.
Their houses would know. Their families would have told it at every Thanksgiving for twenty-five years. There’s no version of this world where those two men stay quiet. That isn’t proof of anything. It’s just the loudest silence in the whole story.
Oh no, Jack. There is a record. Trump called into a local station to brag that he now had the tallest building in New York. Mere hours after the attacks he personally called WWOR-TV and said “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.”
He's a giant awful piece of shit and always has been.
I want to be careful here, because what happened in that building deserves better than what he did to it today.
Three thousand people didn't get to finish their Tuesday. Firefighters climbed stairs while everyone with sense climbed down them. Cops went in without waiting for anyone to tell them the building was already dying. Families spent twenty-five years rebuilding lives around a hole that never fully closes, and some of them are still finding out things about that morning they wish they didn't know. That's the room he walked into today. That's the room he made about himself, again, like he always does, like he can't help it.
He didn't save anyone that day. He wasn't in the building. He wasn't near the building in any capacity that mattered. He watched his own tower get taller in a skyline that was on fire, and he said so out loud, on the record, that same afternoon — while the dust was still in the air over lower Manhattan. That's not conjecture. That's not a hostile interpretation. That's his own quote, sitting there in the archive for anyone who wants to go find it. And twenty-five years later, at a memorial built to honor the people who didn't get a twenty-five-years-later, he's standing at a podium telling a room full of grieving families that he was carried out of danger — like he was some kind of casualty of his own courage. He wasn't rescued. He wasn't a first responder. He didn't run toward anything. He has spent a quarter century sanding down the truth and rebuilding it into a story where he gets to be the subject of the sentence, in a tragedy that was never his to narrate.
This is the same instinct that shows up everywhere else with him. A court order. An election he lost. A war he can't stop talking about like it's a reality show he's starring in. Subordinating himself to anything bigger than his own reflection isn't in the hardware — it was never installed. A memorial exists for exactly one reason: it isn't about you. That is the entire architecture of the event. He is constitutionally, permanently incapable of understanding that sentence. He has never in his life been the second most important person in a room, and apparently 2,977 dead Americans don't get an exception either.
Let's be honest about what he is, because euphemism is how he survives. He is not a hero. He is not a witness with a story worth hearing. He is not even a bystander who happened to be nearby. He is a leech who found a wound big enough for an entire country to bleed into, and he has spent every year since figuring out new ways to drink from it. His name should never again be spoken in the same sentence as heroism, sacrifice, or rescue. He didn't earn the right to those words. He stole the space around them.
So let's do what the day is actually for, and what he'll never do, which is get out of the way.
Welles Crowther. Twenty-four years old. An equities trader on the 104th floor of the South Tower who could have walked out once and been forgiven by history for never looking back. Instead he tied on the red bandanna he'd carried since he was a kid playing volunteer firefighter with his dad, and he went back in. Not once. Again and again, through smoke thick enough to kill a person just from standing in it, carrying people down flight after flight until the building came down with him still inside doing it. He's credited with saving at least a dozen lives, maybe more, and nobody had to order him to do any of it. Nobody heard him talk about it afterward, because there was no afterward for him to talk in.
Say his name. Welles Crowther. Say it once, wherever you're standing, and let that be the only story that gets to leave the room today.
#HOLDFAST