President Donald Trump has once again revived one of his most outlandish claims — a story he’s repeated for years and that fact-checkers have consistently debunked.
This latest slip joins a growing list of strange, self-congratulatory tales that his detractors say reveal how detached from reality he’s become.
During a recent speech marking the Navy’s 250th anniversary in Norfolk, Virginia, Trump brazenly launched into a familiar boast about personally predicting Osama bin Laden’s rise before the September 11 attacks.
“Please remember, I wrote about Osama bin Laden exactly one year — one year before he blew up the World Trade Center and said, ‘You gotta watch Osama bin Laden,’” Trump told the cadets.
He continued, “And the FAKE NEWS would never let me get away with that statement unless it was true… I saw somebody named Osama bin Laden and didn’t like it, and you gotta take care of him. They didn’t do it… We gotta take a little credit because nobody else is going to give it to me.”
However, the claim that Trump specifically “warned” about bin Laden in advance of the 9/11 attacks has been widely challenged.
An Associated Press fact check published last year noted that Trump’s book was released more than 18 months before the 2001 attacks — not “just before” — and that its mention of bin Laden was brief.
“The reference to bin Laden was one of many,” the AP wrote, adding that Trump’s book “did not call for further U.S. action against bin Laden or al Qaeda.”
Trump’s comments came after President Bill Clinton’s 1998 missile strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for terrorist bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The American missile strikes missed bin Laden but disrupted elements of his operation and destroyed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan that was falsely tied to chemical weapons production. The administration announced at the time of the missile strikes that bin Laden was the target.
Despite Trump’s claim that “nobody really knew who he was,” the CIA and other intelligence agencies had already identified bin Laden as a high-level threat several years before the 9/11 attacks.
During his 2016 campaign, Trump repeated that he had “predicted Osama bin Laden” when “nobody really knew who he was,” insisting that his book demonstrated his sixth sense and futile attempts to warn the nation.
At least one person on Threads shared an excerpt from the book that showed Trump had potentially downplayed the threat by bin Laden.
“Trump did mention Osama bin Laden in a book, but he did not warn that bin Laden was about to attack the U.S.,” the person wrote.
View on Threads
“In fact, he downplayed bin Laden’s threat, suggesting he might be “a charade” and that Saddam Hussein was the “real threat.”
The passage also does not include any suggestion to ‘watch Osama bin Laden’ or ‘take him out.’”
Some critics noted that Trump appeared to be subtly claiming credit for the mission ordered by President Barack Obama that ultimately killed bin Laden in Pakistan.
“It was under Bush Jr. when 9/11 happened, it was under Obama when Osama Bin Laden was killed, you had nothing to do with it. Nor did Hegseth,” one person wrote on Threads.
Another quipped: “Is this Osama in the room with you now?”
Other voices highlighted the absurdity of Trump’s claims.
“Trump just said that 2000 was ‘exactly one year ago’ (it has actually been 25 years) and claims that he told Hegseth, who was 20 years-old and in college, that the United States needed to ‘watch out for Osama Bin Laden’ (he didn’t even know Pete Hegseth at that time & Pete was a no-name college kid). He has officially lost his mind.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has tried to sell this tall tale.
During a 2019 press conference announcing the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a U.S.-led raid in Syria, Trump repeated his claim that his book predicted the rise of bin Laden.
“I said you have to kill him. You have to take him out. And nobody ever listened to me. … Let’s put it this way: If they had listened to me, a lot of things would have been different,” Trump said, according to The Guardian. “I didn’t get any credit. I never do,” he continued, referencing “The America We Deserve.
Trump also made the claim in a tweet posted on Nov. 19, 2018:
“Of course we should have captured Osama Bin Laden long before we did. I pointed him out in my book just BEFORE the attack on the World Trade Center. President Clinton famously missed his shot. We paid Pakistan Billions of Dollars & they never told us he was living there. Fools!”
