During a speech at a celebration of the Navy‘s 250th anniversary, Donald Trump claimed that he had warned people about Osama bin Laden a year before the 9/11 attacks, and that they could have been prevented if his warnings were taken seriously.
“Please remember I wrote about Osama bin Laden exactly one year ago, one year before he blew up the World Trade Center. I said, ‘You’ve gotta watch Osama bin Laden.’ And the fake news would never let me get away with that statement unless it was true. But, I said one year before to Pete Hegseth, I said one year before, 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’ve gotta take care of him.'”
The book Trump is referencing, “The America We Deserve,” does mention Osama bin Laden and does identify him as a potential threat to the country, however the mention is extremely brief, and the book was released significantly earlier than Trump indicated. It is also worth noting that Pete Hegseth was 20 years old and attending college in 2000, when Trump claims he told the now-Secretary of Defense about bin Laden.
