Donald Trump's litany of lies includes where he said he was on September 11 in 2001 but...hmmm....he wasn't. Who knew?

Trump: The man who wasn’t there on September 11

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Renée Graham

On that harrowing morning 25 years ago this week, Tania Head said she was working in the World Trade Center’s South Tower when a second plane hijacked by terrorists plowed into the building. 

Her fiancé, she said, was killed in the North Tower, which had been struck by the first plane. Head claimed that she too might have perished if not for Welles Crowther, a young man who died after saving her and others, and came to be known as “the man in the red bandana.”

None of what Head claimed was true. On Sept. 11, 2001, she wasn’t even in this country.

“The Woman Who Wasn’t There,” a 2012, documentary, tells Head’s bizarre story, one which was so believable that she became president of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network. Her story finally unraveled when a New York Times reporter found glaring inconsistencies in her September 11, survival story.

Head isn’t the only 9/11 fabulist. Bizarre, but Donald Trump can’t stop telling lies about where he was and what he did on that day and during its immediate aftermath.

At a Washington, D.C. event on the Ellipse Tuesday to honor first responders who died on that solemn day, Trump falsely claimed that he was saved at Ground Zero by firefighters “right after” the attacks as he stood near another building that he said was at risk for collapse.

“I’ll never forget two firemen, we thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big, strong guys. And I’m not the smallest guy in the world,” Trump said. “They grabbed me under the arm, said, ‘Got to get out of here.’ They literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up, and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down.”

There’s no proof that Trump was at Ground Zero “right after” the attacks. But with his pathological need to center himself in every scenario, even something as sacred as a September 11 memorial event isn’t safe.

After his falsehoods about his 9/11 whereabouts trended and were roasted on social media, Trump, on his own site, later posted that he wasn’t at Ground Zero during the attacks, but arrived “shortly thereafter.” Then he continued with his obligatory anti-media tirade and comments about his “VERY HIGH” approval ratings, which according to CNN, sit at a dismal 35 percent.

On Friday, Trump will skip the 9/11 commemoration at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. Reportedly, once he was told he could not make a speech there — which no president has been allowed to do since 2012, because the National September 11 Memorial and Museum avoids partisanship — he backed out.

Instead Trump sttended a ceremony at the Pentagon, which was also struck by a hijacked plane. That’s also where the president marked the day last year, though the most notable thing about his attendance was his apparent struggle to stay awake.

Since the September 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pa., Trump has spun various unproven tales about what he was doing that day. On Tuesday, he again claimed to have taken “hundreds” of construction workers to Ground Zero to help the cleanup effort after the attacks, although there’s zero evidence that he did any such thing.

Most offensively, Trump, in 2015, claimed to have “watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.” Later asked to explain further, he said, “There were people cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations.”

Steven Fulop, then-Jersey City’s mayor, called Trump’s comments “shameful.”

More than a decade later, Trump’s shamefulness was on display during his remarks at Tuesday’s 9/11 remembrance. What he said is comparable to stolen valor — all of the glory and adulation, but none of the real blood, sweat, and tears. By inserting himself into the narrative and wresting the spotlight toward himself, Trump again tried to promote himself as something that he, unlike the first responders, has never been and will never be — selfless and brave.

This is an excerpt from Outtakes, a Globe Opinion newsletter from columnist Renée Graham.