President Donald Trump isn’t 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 on Sunday, Trump rehashed his years-old claim that he was ahead of the curve when it came to Osama bin Laden, 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 gotta take care of him. They didn’t do it. A year later, he blew up the World Trade Center,” the president said. “So, we gotta 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 oversold 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 didn’t 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 2021, 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-Baghdadi, and then of course Soleimani,” Trump said in an interview 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, the World Trade Center. But these other two guys were monsters. They were monsters,” he said.
