Both major party candidates for president will travel to Shanksville, Pennsylvania to visit the Flight 93 memorial on the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks Friday, marking the first time the two will have potentially overlapping schedules, the Washington Post reports.
Flight 93 crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania after passengers and crew tried to overpower the hijackers, who had intended to smash the plane in a target in Washington, DC. Nearly 3,000 people died in attacks in Washington and New York City as well as the crash of Flight 93.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, then a US Senator, was on an Amtrak train traveling to Washington, DC when his wife called him to tell him about the attacks in New York City.
He arrived at the Senate only to find it being evacuated after a plane struck the Pentagon. He intended to give an address on the Senate floor that day, highlighting the importance of democratic institutions like Congress and NATO. “I refuse to be part of letting these bastards win,” Biden said later that day.
President Trump has made a number of dubious claims about his experience on September 11, 2001. He claimed he watched the World Trade Center towers collapse from his office–in other versions, he saw the second plane hit–but that view would have been blocked by other buildings in the Manhattan skyline, specifically the Empire State Building.
Trump also claimed that he watched, on television, as people in New Jersey–in some versions, he identifies them as Muslims–dancing in the streets celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers. No television station has any film of such an event.
Trump also claimed he led a clean-up crew of employees to remove the rubble after the collapse, but no one remembers him there, nor are there any photos of the less-than-publicity-shy Trump on the site.
In the aftermath of the attack, Trump bragged (incorrectly) that his building, 40 Wall Street, was “now it’s the tallest” building in Manhattan. Trump also claimed that he had many friends who died in the attack, but he did not attend one funeral nor is he able to name one victim he knew.