'If they had listened to me': Trump repeats claim he predicted Bin Laden and warned about 9/11 a year earlier

Donald Trump is not shy of making elaborate claims and the new year seems to have pumped him up with some much-needed energy it seems. After capturing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores and claiming to take over the rule of Venezuela, he is off to making some more of his eyebrow-raising claims.

The President, 79, is back to falsely insisting that he predicted 9/11 and thousands of lives would have been saved, only if people had listened to him. Over the last decade, Trump has made such claims numerous times and it seems he is bent on making it into an annual reminder. On Sunday night, Trump again painted himself as a visionary to reporters aboard Air Force One as he flew back to Washington, D.C. As Senator Lindsey Graham gushed over the US military's capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, Trump suddenly went off to dish out his counterterrorism credentials. And the first thing he could name was reclaiming his prediction of Bin Laden and 9/11. “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.”

Looking at Graham, he added, “Did you know that? I predicted bin Laden.” To which Graham replied, "I learn something new every day."According to him, he warned about the dangers of former Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in his 2000 book, 'The America We Deserve' despite fact checks proving he didn't. He wrote the book along with ghostwriter Dave Shiflett, during his presidential run for Ross Perot's Reform Party USA. Since then, he has made the same claim numerous times.

He said it on The Alex Jones Show in December 2015, then in October 2019 after the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and again in October 2025 while speaking with sailors to mark the US Navy's 250th birthday. However, FactCheck.org wrote in 2015 that “Donald Trump exaggerates his prescience on the 9/11 terrorist attacks when he claims he ‘predicted Osama bin Laden.’” It added that Bin Laden is mentioned in the book only once, where Trump described him as a minor figure in a mosaic of "smaller crises."