President Donald Trump repeated a debunked claim that one of his books warned the world about a former terrorist leader during the Navy 250 celebration on Sunday, which commemorated the 250th anniversary of the American Navy.
During his speech in Norfolk, Virginia, Trump referenced one of his books that called for former Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden to be "taken out" about a year before the September 11 attacks. Even though Trump said that he "can't tell you the name" of the book he referenced in the Sunday speech, he has made similar claims about his 2000 book, "The America We Deserve."
"History will never forget that this was the [Navy] Seals who stormed the compound of Osama Bin Laden and put a bullet in his head," Trump said. "Remember that? And please remember I wrote about Osama Bin Laden exactly one year before he blew up the World Trade Center. I said, 'You gotta watch Osama Bin Laden!' and the fake news would never let me get away with that statement unless it was true."
"In the book—I can't tell you the title—but there is a page in there where I say I saw somebody named Osama Bin Laden and I didn't like it and you gotta take care of him," he continued. "They didn't do it. A year later, he blew up the World Trade Center, so I gotta take a little credit because nobody else is going to give it to me."
"You know the old story," Trump added. "They don't give you credit, just take it yourself."
Trump made similar claims in 2019 after announcing the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, CNN reported. A fact-check of Trump's claims found them to be false.
“About a year – you’ll have to check it, a year, year and a half before the World Trade Center came down, the book came out. I was talking about Osama bin Laden. I said, ‘You have to kill him. You have to take him out.’ Nobody listened to me,” Trump said at the time.
CNN's fact-check revealed Trump's book referred to Bin Laden once, but did not did not "call for bin Laden to be killed or warn that he would perpetrate a major attack if he were not killed."