President Donald Trump was called out for repeating his debunked claim that he predicted the September 11 terror attacks "a year before" they happened—all while speaking at the White House about his war with Iran.
Trump was addressing growing concerns about tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage at the entrance to the Persian Gulf that carries roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply. While the strait falls under international maritime law, Iran maintains substantial influence over the corridor.
The waterway has never been completely shut down, though tanker traffic was disrupted during the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s. Recently, Iran has struck several vessels in the area and warned ships against entering the passage, effectively halting traffic through one of the world’s most critical energy routes.
He then claimed he predicted the late al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden—who orchestrated the September 11 attacks—"would knock out the World Trade Center":
"I knew about the Strait [of Hormuz], that it would be a weapon, which I predicted a long time ago. I predicted all of this stuff... I predicted Osama bin Laden would knock out the World Trade Center."
"I made that prediction a year before he did it. I said, 'You better get him. He's a bad guy.' I watched him be interviewed one time and I said, 'That's a bad guy. You better get him.'"
"One year before, exactly, I wrote it in a book. You can even check, about a year before the World Trade Center came down, President Clinton actually had a shot at him and he didn't take it, unfortunately."
"I'm not blaming him for that, but he didn't take it. And he ended up knocking down the World Trade Center. But I predicted that, too. I predicted a lot of things."
You can hear what Trump said in the video below.
Trump has repeated this claim for years, even though critics note that no such passage appears in his 2000 book The America We Deserve.
In the book, Trump does refer to bin Laden and warns about the possibility of another terrorist attack that could surpass the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. However, he does not explicitly connect bin Laden to that potential attack.
At the time, he wrote:
"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.”
In 2019, Trump again asserted that he had warned the U.S. about bin Laden in 2000, adding that he “never gets any credit” for the claim. In reality, bin Laden had already been placed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in 1999. He doesn't get credit because this never happened.
Trump was swiftly called out.
Trump has long been criticized for disrespecting the memory of those who perished on September 11, even as far back as the very day the attack took place.
On September 11, 2001, Trump, then just a New York real estate mogul, called into a New York TV news broadcast as the station aired footage of the World Trade Center attacks and claimed that his property at 40 Wall Street would now become the tallest building in the area.
That claim turned out to be false; according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, 70 Pine Street, at 952 feet, became the tallest building in the area after September 11. Trump's building at 40 Wall Street is 927 feet tall, 25 feet shorter than 70 Pine Street.
In 2015, Trump—in one of the most widely circulated stories from his presidential campaign—claimed he'd seen "thousands and thousands" of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the attacks. He said he "watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down."
Fact checks from Politifact, The Washington Post, The New York Times and FactCheck.org, have debunked this claim entirely.
A few years ago, Trump even claimed "two big firemen" pulled him to safety after he predicted a nearby building would collapse. He later said that the building "never came down but I never heard a noise like that." He was criticized for never bringing this up until he appeared on Newsmax two decades later.
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