After 9/11, Trump took money marked for small businesses

New York is a great place. It’s got great people. It’s got loving people, wonderful people. When the World Trade Center came down, I saw something that no place on Earth could have handled more beautifully, more humanely than New York. You had two 110-story buildings come crashing down. I saw them come down. Thousands of people killed and the cleanup started the next day, and it was the most horrific cleanup probably in the history of doing this. I’m in construction. I was down there, and I’ve never seen anything like it. And the people in New York fought and fought and fought, and we saw more death and even the smell of death. Nobody understood it. And it was with us for months, the smell, the air. And we rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everybody in the world watched, and everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers…

But it’s worth remembering that amid Trump’s flowery praise for his city, the real-estate mogul took advantage of taxpayer-funds designed to help struggling small-business owners in Lower Manhattan affected by the attack.

Here’s the story. Not long after 9/11, the World Trade Center Business Recovery Grant program was established to help small businesses recover and rebuild. The program disbursed hundreds of millions of dollars through a New York state development corporation in the years following the attacks. But there were problems early on. In 2003, the New York Times reported the development corporation admitted to overpaying some firms and took back $1.2 million. A federal audit, the Times added, suggested at least $5 million had been overpaid by the end of 2003.