Trump falsely claims NYSE reopened the day after 9/11 to justify holding rally

President Trump erroneously claimed that the New York Stock Exchange reopened the day after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks while explaining why he didn’t cancel a campaign rally after the anti-Semitic mass shooting in Pittsburgh on Saturday.

Trump told supporters that he considered canceling the political rally at Southern Illinois Airport in Murphysboro, Ill., but decided against it. He argued that changing plans as the result of politically motivated violence would only serve to make murderers more relevant.

He decided to carry on with the speech — just nine days before the midterms — based on his false recollection that the NYSE opened on Sept. 12, 2001.

“With what happened early today, that horrible, horrible attack in Pittsburgh, I was saying, ‘Maybe I should cancel both this and that.’ And then I said to myself, ‘I remembered Dick Russell, a friend of mine, great guy, he headed up the New York Stock Exchange on September 11th, and the New York Stock Exchange was open the following day.’ He said — and what they had to do to open it you wouldn’t believe, we won’t even talk to you about it. But he got that exchange open. We can’t make these sick, demented, evil people important,” Trump said.

Contrary to Trump’s recollection, the NYSE was closed Sept. 10 through Sept. 17, 2001 — the longest shutdown since the Great Depression. The opening on Sept. 11 was delayed after a plane struck the World Trade Center’s North Tower, and the entire day of trading was called off after a second plane struck the South Tower.

The person who reopened the NYSE was its chief executive at the time, Dick Grasso — not “Dick Russell.”

A few minutes later in his speech, Trump also incorrectly claimed that professional sports teams like the New York Yankees did not cancel any games as a result of the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

“Remember the teams, the Yankees, George Steinbrenner. He said, ‘We have got to play, even if nobody comes. Nobody shows up, we have got to play.”

As SB Nation points out, Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig actually canceled the games for the evening of Sept. 11 and later canceled all of the games scheduled for that week. The entire season was pushed back a full week.

It is true that the reopening of professional baseball and the stock exchange were celebrated as examples of American resiliency in the face of tragedy, but it’s false to claim that no events were canceled.

Memory is fallible and it’s not unusual for people to be honestly mistaken about a progression of events from nearly two decades ago. But Trump has a habit of creating memories out of whole cloth and making them the centerpiece of a speech. He infamously refused to back down on his unsubstantiated claim that “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey were celebrating the attacks on 9/11.

Bloomberg was among the first to pick up on Trump’s rally errors, and the Washington Post’s “fact checker” rated his claims “Four Pinocchios.”

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