President Donald Trump claimed Sunday that he foresaw the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and believes the September 11 terrorist attacks could have been prevented if U.S. officials had acted on his warning.
Trump made the remarks while speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One, accompanied by Sen. Lindsey Graham and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. The conversation followed questions about recent U.S. military action that resulted in the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife.
During the exchange, Graham urged Democrats to applaud the operation, drawing a parallel to the bipartisan response after Osama bin Laden was killed. Graham said he had been “the first to applaud” President Barack Obama when bin Laden was taken out. Trump seized on the reference to pivot to his long-running assertion that he warned about bin Laden well before the 9/11 attacks.
“By the way, you know, you mentioned something that’s interesting. Lindsey mentioned bin Laden,” Trump said. He then claimed he had written about bin Laden a year before the World Trade Center attack and urged action against him. “I said you got to go after bin Laden. It was in my book, and very few people want to say that, but it was in my book,” Trump told reporters.
The president went further, asserting that the tragedy of September 11 might have been avoided had his comments been taken seriously at the time. Addressing one reporter, Trump said, “If they would have listened to me, they would have taken out bin Laden and you wouldn’t have had the World Trade Center tragedy.”
Trump has made similar claims on multiple occasions over the years, including as recently as October. Those statements have been repeatedly scrutinized by media fact-checkers, who have disputed the president’s characterization of his past remarks.
According to those reviews, Trump’s 2000 book does not contain a direct warning predicting that bin Laden would carry out the 9/11 attacks. The book references bin Laden only once, in a broader critique of U.S. foreign policy and what Trump described as a series of disjointed international crises.
In that passage, Trump wrote that the United States was facing “a bewildering series of smaller crises” rather than one overarching conflict. He referenced bin Laden as an example of how America’s attention shifted from one threat to another, noting that U.S. jet fighters bombed his camp in Afghanistan before he escaped, only for the focus to later move on to a new enemy.
As CNN has reported, the book does include a separate section warning that the United States was vulnerable to a major terrorist attack that would make the 1993 World Trade Center bombing look minor by comparison. However, that passage did not identify bin Laden or al Qaeda as the perpetrators of such an attack.
Trump’s comments on Sunday reflect a familiar theme in his public remarks, where he has argued that political and national security failures stem from leaders ignoring strong warnings and decisive voices. Supporters often view those statements as part of Trump’s broader critique of the foreign policy establishment, while critics point to the documented text of his book to challenge the accuracy of his claim.
The exchange came amid a broader discussion of U.S. military operations and national security, with Trump and his allies urging unity and recognition of decisive action abroad. While debate continues over Trump’s assertion regarding bin Laden, the president used the moment to argue that strong leadership and early action are critical in confronting global threats before they turn into national tragedies.
[READ MORE: Trump Escalates Foreign Policy Rhetoric]
