Former U.S. President Donald Trump has once again repeated a demonstrably false assertion regarding Osama bin Laden, suggesting a pattern of attempting to reshape historical narrative through repetition. The incident occurred on Sunday aboard Air Force One, where Trump was accompanied by Senator Lindsey Graham and a group of reporters.
The In-Flight Claim and a Pivot to History
While discussing the capture and extradition of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to face narco-terrorism charges in New York, Trump pivoted to an astonishing claim about the former al Qaeda leader. He stated that Senator Graham had mentioned bin Laden, prompting his own commentary.
"Do you know I wrote about bin Laden one year before the attack in the World Trade Center and I said, you got to go after bin Laden?" Trump claimed falsely. He insisted the warning was in his book and that "very few people want to say that, but it was in my book." He told a reporter, "You know that I think you’ve actually talked about it. But 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."
Fact-Checking "The America We Deserve"
Trump has made this claim numerous times over the years. The book in question, "The America We Deserve," was published in 2000. While it does mention Osama bin Laden, it does not contain the specific warning or directive to "go after" him that Trump describes.
The relevant passage reads: "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."
The text acknowledges bin Laden as a known threat but does not explicitly link him to a future attack on the World Trade Center or urge preemptive action. It is also worth noting that bin Laden was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in 1999, a year before the book's publication.
A Pattern of Repetition
This is not an isolated incident. For example, in 2019 during a press conference announcing the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Trump revisited the claim. "In that book about a year before the World Trade Center was blown up, I said, 'There’s somebody named Osama bin Laden. You’d better kill him or take him out,'" he stated. He added, "Let’s put it this way ― if they would have listened to me, a lot of things would have been different."
This persistent narrative, repeated in different contexts from Air Force One to formal press conferences, appears to be an effort to retrospectively insert a prescient warning into the historical record where none explicitly exists in the cited source.
The repetition of this claim, despite clear evidence to the contrary from the very book he references, highlights a continued effort to alter the public's understanding of pre-9/11 history and inflate his own foresight regarding one of America's most significant national security failures.
