President Donald Trump is not done patting himself on the back for supposedly flagging a notorious terrorist ahead of the devastating 9/11 attack. In a meandering speech to commemorate the Navy’s 250th birthday, the former president rehashed his years-old claim that he was ahead of the curve when it came to Osama bin Laden, the infamous founder of the terrorist group al Qaeda.
“Please remember I wrote about Osama bin Laden exactly one year ago [sic] before he blew up the World Trade Center, and I said ‘You got to watch Osama bin Laden’” Trump said, citing his own book “whatever the hell the title I can’t tell you.”
“There’s a page in there devoted to the fact that I saw somebody named Osama bin Laden, and I didn’t like it, and you got to take care of him. They didn’t do it. A year later, he blew up the World Trade Center, so” the president went on. “Got to take a little credit because nobody else is going to give it to me. You know the old story, they don’t give you credit, just take it yourself.”
Trump has made this claim several times since the publication of his book The America We Deserve in 2000. But the president consistently oversells what he actually said about bin Laden, who was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs in Pakistan in 2011. Though Trump does mention bin Laden in his book, he did not say that the militant leader should have been killed.
“One day we’re told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin Laden is public enemy Number One and U.S. jetfighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan,” Trump wrote in his book. “He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis.”
In a separate 2021 interview, Trump dismissed bin Laden as only having “one hit” while touting the terrorists killed during his first administration. “We took out the founder of ISIS, al al-Baghdadi, and then of course Soleimani,” Trump said at the time, adding that Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani was “bigger by many, many times” than bin Laden.
“Osama bin Laden had one hit, and it was a bad one in New York City at the World Trade Center. But these other two guys were monsters. They were monsters,” he said. The comments resurfaced as Trump continues to shape his public narrative ahead of the upcoming election cycle.