Trump calls other people's Ground Zero moment terrible, his own retelling exactly accurate.

…(cont) Because here's the part that doesn't sit next to it easy. Back on August 27th, weeks before any of this, the plan on the books wasn't Ground Zero at all — it was the Pentagon — because, the paper reported, the memorial's own organizers don't allow speeches there. He changed the plan. According to the file, is that the reason it moved — the rule about speeches — or is there another one I'm missing, because the file only hands me the one?

Now walk me through the ceremony itself the same way — who showed up, doing what, in what order. The receipt I've got says the Mayor was there on the 11th, and that Rudy Giuliani — who'd called on him to skip the thing entirely — shook his hand instead. That's the receipt. It does not tell me where the President was standing when that happened, and I'm not going to put him someplace the file doesn't put him. What I've got is the handshake, and I've got, two days later, the President calling it "terrible" that Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and Mayor Mamdani appeared to laugh during the ceremony. Appeared to — that's the wire's word, not something I watched myself off a screen. Fair enough. Do we get the same hedge handed to the other story?

Let me try it at the toll plaza, since that's a place where a claim like that gets tested on any day, whether anybody's looking or not. You go through, the gate reads the tag, and the statement shows up at the end of the month with a time stamped on each entry, in order. If you tell the bank you got off at exit 9 at 4:15 and the statement says 4:52 at exit 12, nobody's reaching for the word I already used on you. Nobody fact-checks a toll receipt into matching. It either matches the tape or the state sends you a bill. So walk me through what makes an account of a day in 2001 different from a gate arm — is it that there's no tag, or that nobody's sending the bill?

I already spent that word once on you, and I'm sorry, I don't like coming back a second time to the same thing, so let me put it the other way instead of saying it again: he's calling one account of one day precise down to the letter, and calling somebody else's face on a different day terrible, and it's the first claim the fact-checks landed on, not the second. Excuse me — before you go — of those two things sitting on the same desk this week, which got the benefit of the hedge, the laugh that was only "appeared to," or the account that survived a deluge and came out the other side exactly?