Fact check: Trump falsely claims, again, that his pre-9/11 book warned about Osama bin Laden

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump likes to portray himself as a visionary, someone who sees important things before others. Trump has been claiming for the last decade that in a book he published the year before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he warned the authorities that they needed to deal with Osama bin Laden.

Trump’s claim is false. His 2000 book contained no warning at all about bin Laden. His tale about the book’s nonexistent warning was conclusively debunked in 2015. CNN published another debunking when he revived the tale in 2019.

But the president repeated it once again on Sunday – to a crowd of sailors celebrating the 250th birthday of the US Navy.

This time, Trump delivered the phony narrative after saying history wouldn’t forget how it was Navy Seals who killed bin Laden (in 2011 under then-President Barack Obama, a frequent target of Trump criticism). Trump added, in an apparent ad-lib, “And please remember, I wrote about Osama bin Laden exactly one year ago,” then corrected himself and said, “One year before he blew up the World Trade Center. And I said, ‘You’ve got to watch Osama bin Laden.’ And the fake news would never let me get away with that statement unless it was true.”

It’s not true, as news outlets have pointed out for years. But Trump continued: “In the book, I wrote – whatever the hell the title, I can’t tell you – but I can 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. So, you gotta take a little credit, because nobody else is gonna give it to me.”

People don’t give Trump credit for his book’s warning about bin Laden because that warning doesn’t exist.

Trump’s 2000 book contained just one passing mention of bin Laden

The book, titled “The America We Deserve,” did not tell anyone they needed to “watch” or “take care of” bin Laden. That wouldn’t have been particularly prescient advice even if Trump had offered it in January 2000 – bin Laden was already a well-known threat to Americans at the time – but the book simply did not offer it.

Here’s the book’s single mention of bin Laden, in a section criticizing US foreign policy: “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.”

That is clearly not any advice to anyone about bin Laden. And it contains an acknowledgment that bin Laden had already been targeted by then-President Bill Clinton (after the 1998 terror attacks on US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya).

In a separate section of the book, Trump did predict that the US would be hit by major terror attacks, writing, “I really am convinced we’re in danger of the sort of terrorist attacks that will make the (1993) bombing of the Trade Center look like kids playing with firecrackers. No sensible analyst rejects this possibility, and plenty of them, like me, are not wondering if but when it will happen.”

But Trump did not predict that bin Laden (or anyone else in particular) would be responsible for these future attacks. And Trump acknowledged it was a widespread belief among analysts that major attacks would occur, not a special insight of his own.

It’s understandable if Trump doesn’t remember precisely what was in the book; it was released 25 years ago and was ghostwritten by someone else, writer Dave Shiflett. But that doesn’t excuse a decade of boasting about how the book supposedly includes something it actually doesn’t.

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