President Donald Trump is back to falsely insisting he predicted 9/11 and failed to save thousands of lives only because no one listened to him.
Over the course of the last decade, the 79-year-old has frequently made the claim that he warned of the dangers of former Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in his 2000 book The America We Deserve, despite fact checks proving that he didn’t.
He repeated it on Sunday night, painting himself as a visionary to reporters aboard Air Force One as he flew to Washington, D.C.
In a mile-high huddle with Sen. Lindsey Graham, who gushed over the U.S. military operation to capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, Trump suddenly peeled off for a tangent about his supposed counterterrorism credentials.
“By the way, you mention something that is interesting,” the president said. “Lindsey mentioned bin Laden. You know, I wrote about bin Laden one year before the attack on the World Trade Center. And I said, you have to go after bin Laden. It was in my book.
“Very few people want to say that. But it was in my book… [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.”
Then, looking at Graham, he said, “Did you know that? I predicted bin Laden.”
“I learn something new every day,” Graham replied.
Trump wrote the book, with the help of ghostwriter Dave Shiflett, during his fruitless presidential run for Ross Perot’s Reform Party USA. He has since claimed several times that those pages contained wisdom that could have prevented the deadliest terror attack ever carried out against the U.S.
He said it on The Alex Jones Show in December 2015. He then said it again as president following the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in October 2019, and again in October 2025 as he spoke to sailors to mark the U.S. Navy’s 250th birthday.
But over and over it’s been debunked, with FactCheck.org writing in 2015 that “Donald Trump exaggerates his prescience on the 9/11 terrorist attacks when he claims he ‘predicted Osama bin Laden.’”
In fact, it points out that bin Laden is mentioned only once in the whole book, in the following passage, where he talks about him as a minor figure in a mosaic of “smaller crises”:
“Instead of one looming crisis hanging over us, we face a bewildering series of smaller crises, flash points, standoffs, and hot spots. We’re not playing the chess game to end all chess games anymore. We’re playing tournament chess — one master against many rivals. One day we’re all assured that Iraq is under control, the UN inspectors have done their work, everything’s fine, not to worry. The next day the bombing begins. 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.”
Trump’s comment comes after the U.S. stunned the world with a pre-dawn raid in Caracas, claiming it was a matter of national security for America to stem the flow of drugs and open the country up for business.
Trump’s allies have praised the operation and begun to suggest similar measures should be taken in other countries. Beyond his insistence that Trump should be applauded for the Venezuelan operation, Graham also made a threat against Cuba.
“This was one of the most sophisticated military operations in the history of the country. What they were able to do was amazing. They knew we were coming. We had a good part of the Navy and they were able to capture this man alive, no military in the world could have done it, and it is due to this commander-in-chief,” Graham said.
“He did something people talked about doing. You just wait for Cuba. Cuba is a communist dictatorship that has killed priests and nuns, they have preyed on their own people, their days are numbered,” Graham said.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
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