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Trump said his book 26 years ago predicted 9/11, Laden's plan. Except it didn't | Fact Check
Trump has been making this claim for years; the book the realtor-politician speaks about is ‘The America We Deserve’, which came out in the year 2000.
US President Donald Trump is hardly short of big claims but he recycled an old and massive one this week. "I predicted Osama bin Laden would knock out the World Trade Center. I made that prediction a year before he did it," he said, referring to the September 11, 2001, attacks.
“I wrote it in a book,” he said at a press briefing on Monday, while speaking about the ongoing US-Israel war with Iran.
Except that he's been making this claim for years now. The book the realtor-politician speaks about is ‘The America We Deserve’, which came out around a year and a half before 9/11.
What the book said
The book did mention of Osama bin Laden. It also mentioned the World Trade Center. But the prediction Trump claims he made is, at best, an extrapolation.
Back in 2018, when he was serving his first stint as President, Trump had written this on Twitter (since renamed ‘X’ by his frenemy Elon Musk): “I pointed him (Laden) out in my book just BEFORE the attack on the World Trade Center.”
The book, actually, did not do any more than point to the terror leader as one of many threats to US security, news agency AP reported in its fact-check.
The context of his 2018 tweet was more immediate, and pointedly political. A senior retired US army officer, Admiral William McRaven, had criticised Trump for his constant attacks on the media. McRaven was the commander of the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command in 2011 when American forces killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
Trump hit out at him over the Laden operation.
“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 (Bill) Clinton famously missed his shot. We paid Pakistan Billions of Dollars & they never told us he was living there. Fools!” he wrote in another social media post.
In this 2000 book, as part of his criticism of Bill Clinton’s policies, Trump wrote: “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. He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis.”
As for the mention of the WTC, Trump did indeed say that the the US was at risk of a terror attack that would make the 1993 World Trade Center bombing pale by comparison. He was referring to the February 26, 1993, van-bomb attack below the North Tower of the WTC in New York City. A 606- kg bomb was intended to make the tower collapse onto the South Tower, taking down both skyscrapers and killing tens of thousands of people. The plan failed in scale, though six people died and over 1,000 were injured.
Trump's many claims
On Tuesday, Trump again said he'd told the then US administration “you better take him out”. The book did not say that, AP reported. He's also said he made predictions on Laden when “nobody really knew who he was". In fact, Laden was well-known to the CIA, as he also fought in the America-backed operations against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
