First we had alternative facts. Now we have alternative history.
Users are flooding Twitter with #LostTrumpHistory memes after the U.S. President seemed to suggest he was on the ground with first responders during 9/11.
According to the ongoing onslaught of historically dubious claims, Trump painted the Mona Lisa, built the Great Wall of China and attended the moon landing.
Confused? It’s a communal response to comments Trump made Monday in a White House Rose Garden ceremony.
Trump signed a bill to extend the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund on Monday, but in his speech before putting pen to paper, he said something that caught the internet’s attention.
While praising first responders, Trump said, “I was down there also (at Ground Zero).
“But I’m not considering myself a first responder, but I was down there,” he continued. “I spent a lot of time down there with you.”
He did not extrapolate on exactly what he meant.
On several occasions, Trump has spun different narratives about his whereabouts and actions around 9/11, but has failed to provide evidence to support these claims. On the campaign trail in 2016, he said he “helped a little bit” to physically clear rubble away. Before that, in 2015, he claimed to have watched people jump during the collapse of the towers from his Manhattan apartment, despite the fact that his apartment was roughly four miles away.
After Monday’s comments, Twitter users immediately began to mock the remarks by inserting Trump into historical events he was not present for, and filing them all under the hashtag #LostTrumpHistory.
The hashtag places Trump all over the globe and scatters him throughout time, from revealing him as a first responder for the Titanic to giving him Amelia Earhart’s place in history.
Since Trump took office in 2016, he has uttered more than 10,000 false or misleading claims, according to the Washington Post’s fact checker.
