Did Serge Kovaleski's 2001 reporting support Trump's 9/11 claims?
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Executive summary
Serge Kovaleski’s September 2001 reporting did not substantiate Donald Trump’s repeated claim that he had seen “thousands and thousands” of people in New Jersey celebrating the 9/11 attacks; the Washington Post piece referenced by the Trump campaign was inconclusive and described only that authorities detained “a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating” while follow-up reporting could not verify mass celebrations [1] [2]. Kovaleski himself and his co-reporter have said they do not recall any reporting of “thousands” or even “hundreds” celebrating, and multiple fact-checks concluded Trump mischaracterized the record [3] [2] [4].
1. The original reporting and what it actually said
The Washington Post article from September 2001 that Trump cited included a paragraph saying authorities detained “a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks” and noted reports of tailgate-style gatherings on rooftops, but the piece did not claim widespread or numerically large celebrations, and the language was tentative and investigative rather than definitive [1] [5]. Contemporary follow-ups and the reporters’ own recollections show the Post story was inconclusive: Kovaleski said he did not remember anyone reporting “thousands” or “hundreds” celebrating, and his co-author Fredrick Kunkle reported he could not verify the purported celebrations after on-the-ground reporting in Jersey City [2] [3].
2. How Trump used the story and where the gap appears
Donald Trump repeatedly invoked the 2001 Washington Post paragraph as proof that he had seen mass celebrations in New Jersey, but fact-checkers and news organizations found that the Post did not support the scale of Trump’s claim and that his anecdote about personally watching “thousands and thousands” on TV was unsupported by the Post or other contemporaneous reporting [2] [1]. Trump’s defenders pointed to other clips and reports—such as a WCBS segment and an MTV investigation—that referenced alleged celebratory behavior by small groups, but even those items do not corroborate the sweeping, large-number claim Trump made [2] [5].
3. The reporters’ statements and independent verification
After the claim resurfaced in 2015, Kovaleski and Kunkle pushed back: Kovaleski stated he did not remember anyone saying there were hundreds or thousands celebrating and characterized the reporting as part of broader, then-frantic reporting in the aftermath of the attacks [3] [2]. FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and other outlets concluded the Post article was inconclusive at best and could not be reasonably read to substantiate Trump’s “thousands” assertion [4] [2].
4. Political theater, misrepresentation and the ensuing controversy
Trump’s public invocation of the story escalated into a larger controversy when he mocked Kovaleski in a campaign speech while insisting he was simply citing the 2001 article, an act widely condemned as mocking a reporter’s disability; media coverage framed the episode as both a factual misrepresentation about 9/11-era celebrations and an ethically fraught personal attack on a journalist [6] [1]. Critics argued that Trump transformed a tentative, investigatory line in a Post article into an unsubstantiated personal eyewitness claim for political effect [7].
5. Alternative viewpoints and the limits of the record
Some commenters and conservative supporters pointed to isolated contemporaneous reports of small groups or individuals allegedly celebrating in the aftermath of 9/11 and to clips that referenced such incidents, arguing these show some celebratory behavior occurred [2] [5]. However, neither those isolated reports nor the Washington Post paragraph provide credible evidence of the widespread, televised celebrations that Trump claimed to have seen, and the primary reporters on the Post piece have said their work does not support the scale Trump described [2] [3].