Did President Donald Trump really make a post threatening to close the 9/11 Memorial in New York because he wasn't allowed to speak at the annual remembrance ceremony? No, that's not true: A review of Trump's Truth Social account found no record of such a post. There are also no credible reports that he ever made the online statement or threatened to close the memorial over being denied an opportunity to speak at the ceremony.
The claim appeared in a post and image (archived here) by the @ShawS983 account on X on Aug. 30, 2026. It read:
This demented Fool 🤡definitely needs to be tossed in a padded room! 😳🐷👎🏽
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @ShawS983 on X.)
The text in the image says:
'The National September 11 Memorial and Museum commission decided I'm not allowed to speak at the remembrance. Imagine that? A native new Yorker. The greatest president in history. We're looking into shutting them down permanently, remove the memorial and building a statue of me as tall as the World Trade Center. Not to brag or anything, but I single handedly saved 500 thousand people in those burning buildings. I ran 110 floors at least 50 times within 30 minutes pulling people out of tight spaces. I almost died.' DJT
The text of the post said to be from Trump includes numerous grammatical, punctuation, and capitalization errors.
Lead Stories manually reviewed Trump's Truth Social account for recent posts showing the same post (archived here). Lead Stories also searched Trump's Truth (archived here), a website that archives Trump's Truth Social posts, for the term "National September 11 Memorial." At the time of writing, no posts were found matching the full text of the fake post.
News searches
Lead Stories searched Google News (archived here) and Yahoo News (archived here) and did not find any matching reports for "Trump," "9/11 memorial," "speak," AND "close."
The 9/11 Memorial & Museum has a long-standing policy (archived here) that, since 2012, has barred politicians and elected officials from giving speeches or reading poetry at the annual commemoration ceremony at the World Trade Center site, known as Ground Zero.
