Of all the lies Donald Trump, that fact-fucking, grief-grafting, tragedy-jacking, bullshit-belching, pathological, sociopathic shitheel, has sluiced through that puckered little piss hole, his lies about September 11 are the ones that fucking get me the most.
Every time.
I wish they didn’t. After all these years of deceit and delusion and relentless daily derangement, you would think I could roll my eyes and move on.
I never can.
This one gets under my skin, behind my ribs, into that place where anger and grief are so fucking tangled I don’t know which I’m feeling first.
Because it’s 9/11.
And I can’t make myself be numb to that.
Because like so many of us, I lived through it, and it’s fucking personal.
It remains one of the darkest days of my life, and even now, twenty-five years later, sitting here trying to reach backward and retrieve what it felt like to inhabit those first impossible hours in real time, I come up empty in exactly the place I came up empty then.
I remember being breathless. Untethered from any sense of reality I had ever known, staring at towers I had grown up marveling at, those immense silver monoliths teeming with the small, sacred, staggering ordinariness of an average Tuesday: elevators rising, phones ringing, coffee cooling beside keyboards, restaurant kitchens clattering, somebody bitching about a meeting, somebody making lunch plans, somebody kissing someone goodbye without knowing they had just spoken the last unremarkable sentence of their life.
All those private little universes humming along behind all that steel and glass, every floor crowded with errands and appetites and aggravations and people who fully expected to be somewhere else by dinner.
And then they weren’t.
People I loved worked there.
People I knew worked there.
Then I watched those towers burn and buckle and accordion into themselves with thousands of people still in them, saw paper drift with this almost obscene delicacy through that crystalline September blue, saw two familiar pieces of my horizon become smoke and pulverized steel and absence while my brain kept rejecting what my eyes had absorbed.
I have never found a word big enough to hold it.
The sky stayed.
The people didn’t.
All across this country, we stood wherever that morning had stranded us, gathered around televisions, hovering beside landlines, calling and calling and calling, trying to comprehend something so monstrous, so far outside the architecture of anything we understood that there was nothing to do but stare at the wound it had opened in the world.
We were all asking: How could this happen? What do we do now?
Donald Trump asked a different question:
How do I make myself the fucking hero of this?
That same afternoon, while Manhattan choked on ash, while people walked north wearing powdered pieces of an office, a desk, a human being in their hair, Trump called WWOR-TV and talked about 40 Wall Street. His building. Now the tallest downtown, he bragged. It wasn’t, but that didn’t matter to him.
Three thousand people had just been murdered and this necrotic narcissist heard a real-estate opportunity ka-chinging beneath the sirens.
Two days later, he turned up in front of cameras. Where exactly? Who the fuck knows. Near enough to the smoking pile to get attention. Firefighters slept against concrete, too exhausted to find somewhere softer. Search dogs kept working until their paws bled. The cameras recorded that—the bodies giving out, the terrible, stubborn effort to find somebody who still had a breath left. All that footage from the most photographed square mile on the planet. And in that vast, unbearable record of what it took to be useful in the ruins, where is one fucking frame of Donald Trump moving so much as a pebble?
Not. One.
If he had moved ONE GODDAMN BRICK, that brick would have a provenance more thoroughly documented than the Crown Jewels. Mar-a-Lago would hang a fifty-foot oil painting of Trump heaving an I-beam across his shoulders while a bald eagle cries into the Hudson.
Not one photograph exists. Not a shred of evidence for any of it — not the hundreds of men he says he sent, not the rubble he says he moved, not one minute of him lifting a finger for anybody. None of it happened. It has never stopped him from saying it happened.
He said it again on Fox last week. And then today, somehow, inexplicably, he made it worse. Days before we honor the fallen, twenty-five years after 9/11, he came up with something new.
Now there were two firemen. Big strong guys, shockingly. They grabbed him under the arms — got to get you out of here — and they lifted him up and started running with him.
Running with him.
Give me a fucking break.
Every time he tells it he gets braver and the men who save him get bigger, and now this man who has never lifted anything heavier than a nine iron is being carried out of the smoke like a wounded general while actual firefighters were going the other way and not coming back.
Come the fuck on.
I know by now that nothing should surprise me, but what guts me most is the gobsmacking contempt embedded in all of it, the breathtaking callousness, cruelty, predatory indifference and psychic frigidity of this malevolent, melon-hued megalomaniac toward the people who never needed to embroider themselves into the story because they were already inside it, breathing it, bleeding into it, carrying it home.
It went into them: concrete, pulverized glass, asbestos, benzene, human remains, an entire vertical city ground into poisonous gray particulate that slipped into the lungs of people too busy searching for other human beings to wonder what the air might cost them. September 11 did not stop taking lives when the towers fell. Coughs became scans, scans became biopsies, and men and women who had walked into hell looking for strangers discovered that hell had hitched a ride home inside their bodies.
I knew people who died that morning. I knew others who died because of that morning. Around here, everybody knew somebody.
My roommate had worked at Windows on the World. So had my boyfriend at the time. Friends of friends, people from firehouses, a friend’s husband, a face you recognized from the train.
For weeks afterward, the cars sat in the commuter lots exactly where they had been left. Rows of them. Coffee calcifying in cup holders. A cardigan slumped across a passenger seat because the office got cold. Parking permits dangling from rearview mirrors. All those small, mundane keepsakes of a life in motion suddenly unbearable, because the hands that left them there were never coming back for them.
Nothing inside those cars knew the world had ended for someone.
That is grief. The ordinary becoming sacred. Milk in the refrigerator. A dog cocking its head at every familiar engine. A voicemail nobody deletes because there is breath in it. A fucking Tuesday that never got to finish.
And Donald Trump reached into that. Forced himself into it, the way he forces himself onto women, because intrusion is his native language, because nothing is allowed to remain outside the radius of his appetite, because every wound, every loss, every grave seems to present itself to him as one more opening through which he can shove some swollen little fantasy of his own importance.
He scavenges catastrophe, siphons courage, strip-mines sorrow, fingers through bereavement for anything bright enough to steal, then crams the whole blood-slick bundle through the distended sausage casing of his self-regard until somebody else’s heroism comes squirming out the other end stamped TRUMP, shrink-wrapped and ready for resale.
He is a sociopath. He has no regard for human life or human suffering. Where empathy should live in a person, there is only an empty elevator shaft, the doors sliding open onto cold black nothing, no car, no cables, no bottom, just a lightless plummet through all the floors of human feeling that were never fucking built.
He is a sadistic, self-fellating sack of shit who feeds on grief. He lied about our dead while families were still dialing phones, still searching hospitals, still saying missing because dead was a word too monstrous to let into the room.
And he is lying about them now, a quarter-century later, while their names are still being read aloud.
The responders earned their place with blood and breath and broken bodies and years they never got back. The dead paid for theirs with everything.
Donald Trump does not get to shoplift valor from either of them.
This week, families will gather again at Ground Zero and read the names for hours, each one opening onto an entire life that goes on existing in the people left behind: keys turning in the door at six o’clock, a laugh unmistakable across a crowded room, perfume lingering in the collar of a coat, pipe tobacco ghosting the lining of a jacket, handwriting slanting across a grocery list nobody can quite bring themselves to throw away, the warm hollow on one side of a bed, the throwaway last sentence someone has carried ever since because nobody knew it was going to be the last.
That day belongs to the people who died in those attacks and the people September 11 kept killing long after the skyline cleared. To the ones who never came home and the ones who ran toward the smoke. To the families who learned how absence can inhabit a house, settle into drawers and closets and holidays, change the shape of a dinner table and the sound of a room. To the people who remain, who gather every year to lift those names into the September air so the dead are not reduced to a number, a photograph, a date carved into stone.
I don’t expect a creature capable of such abject, unabashed depravity to understand what it means to mourn, what it means to remember, what it means to be humbled, what it means to honor any of them.
I just wish he would get the fuck out of the way while the rest of us do.
2 comments
That was just too painful to read in its entirety. I remember the day. I was driving from Springfield, MA to Hartford, CT when the radio station I was listening to cut in to report the first plane had crashed into the tower. I sensed immediately that this was no accident. The unfolding story, a second plane, then Washington DC and the heroes on the plane in Pennsylvania. We watched the TV coverage in horror for days. It brings me to tears now, just thinking of the carnage, the destruction, the human suffering. May we all rest in peace.
The image that haunts me to this day are clips of people in the tower choosing to throw themselves out of the broken windows instead of burning to death being crushed.