Donald Trump, in yet another obscene attempt to benefit politically from the tragedy of 9/11, has told yet another lie about his personal observations on that day. He claims that he personally saw people jumping from the Twin Towers, not in photos or on TV, but looking out the window of his apartment at Trump Tower in Manhattan.
www.cnn.com/…
He went on and on about his great view of the Twin Towers from his apartment. The only difficulty with his story is that Trump Tower is at 56th Street and 5th Avenue, in Midtown Manhattan, more than 4 miles from the World Trade Center. There are many tall buildings between Trump Tower and where the Twin Towers stood, including the Empire State Building. But even if he somehow had an unobstructed view, it is physically impossible that he stood or sat looking out his window and saw people jumping.
The typical set of human eyes has a visual acuity of about 1 arc minute, or 1/60th of a degree. io9.com/… From a distance of even 4 miles, a 6 foot object has a perceived size of a little less than 1 arc minute, which means that he couldn’t have seen anything the size of a human being falling from the Twin Towers, much less in sufficient detail to have any idea that it was people jumping to their deaths. Here is a link to one such calculator: sizecalc.com/…
The funeral for a young woman who was killed when United Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania was held in the church I was then attending. As an attorney at DOJ, I spent three weeks around the Christmas-New Year’s holidays of 2001-2002 informing the survivors of those killed on 9/11 (and a few who were lucky enough to only have been injured) about the federal victim compensation program. I talked to and hugged the parents of a young man whose father worked at the WTC and had gotten his son a job there, and wished that 9/11 had been his day off, rather than his son's. I talked to a mother who did watch the Towers fall, and hoped against hope that her son had been late to work that day (he hadn’t been). I talked to a man who’d had a silly argument with his wife that morning and never had a chance to kiss and make up. I talked to a young woman who had just begun her freshman year at a prominent university, the first in her family to go to college, and dropped out to desperately return to New York City, hoping to find her mother in a hospital somewhere. I talked to a Muslim woman who lost her husband, and to a Muslim immigrant from South Asia who was injured by flying debris and forlornly said that he didn’t understand how people could do something so horrible in the name of his religion to a country that had treated him so well. I will never forget those people, or the many others I met during those 3 weeks.
There isn’t much on which I have agreed with George W. Bush, but at least he didn’t use 9/11 to foment anti-Muslim hysteria as Trump is doing. To use the tragedy of the lives lost that day to seek to advance one’s own political agenda is obscene, especially when that effort involves stirring up hatred for the religion of other Americans, including Americans who lost their lives on that day. But despicable and obscene don’t even begin to describe an effort to benefit from the events of that day by LYING about them and trying to put yourself close to them, as Donald Trump is doing.
I’m 66 years old, which means that I remember George Wallace’s campaign. I never thought I’d live to see a more odious campaign than that one, but Trump has now surpassed it in his disgusting and lying appeals to bigotry and hate.