Trump Lies About NYSE Opening The Day After 9/11 To Justify Holding Rally After Shooting
During a speech at a Future Farmers of America event hours after today’s horrific mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue that left 11 dead, President Donald Trump told a ridiculous and easily fact-checked lie to justify his decision to hold a campaign rally this evening.
Telling the crowd that he was always coming to their event, the president noted that he was asked whether he would go on to Illinois to hold his scheduled political campaign rally. He stated that he considered canceling but decided to go forward with it because “we can’t let evil change our life and change our schedule.”
“You don’t want to change your life,” Trump added. “You can’t make them important. These are bad people. You can’t allow them to dominate what we do. So I’ll go. Not that I want to go, but I think that I actually in reverse have an obligation to go.”
Honestly, that is a generally admiral stance, and one that was brought up quite a bit after the 9/11 terror attacks. And Trump decided to tie his decision to that national tragedy by telling a Four Pinnochio-level lie.
“I remember when we had the attack in Manhattan, we opened that stock exchange the next day,” Trump boasted. “People were shocked. A great group of people — the head of the New York Stock Exchange is just a fantastic guy, Dick, and he — he opened it up, got it open.”
He continued, “Everybody was standing proudly with him. And the purpose wasn’t financial. Had nothing to do with financial. It was that everybody was standing proudly with him, and the purpose wasn’t financial, it had nothing to do with financial. It was that we don’t want to let people that are evil change our lives.”
In reality, the New York Stock Exchange didn’t open until the Monday following the terror attacks that brought down the World Trade Center — six days later.
Not sure why the president felt the need to tell such an easily provable lie, but he does have a history of telling falsehoods and exploiting 9/11. In the past, he has lied about helping clean up rubble at Ground Zero, that he watched people from his apartment window jumping from the Twin Towers after the planes hit, and that he witnesses thousands of Muslim Americans dancing in the streets and celebrating the attacks.
Watch the clip above, via CSPAN.
