The Video That Started It

May 12, 2011, a day that would soon go down as one of the greatest military achievements of our country. At 1:00 p.m. a group of highly trained Navy Seals storm Bin Laden’s hideout. A Navy Seal named Robert O’Neill breaks into Bin Laden’s room and finds him hiding behind his wife. O’Neill takes the shot. That’s it. Bin Laden’s name had been hanging over our country ever since 9/11; a day when our country lost the most. According to some, all of this could have been stopped. Former President Donald Trump has been very certain that he predicted the 9/11 attack and even has proof in his book, The America We Deserve. In many videos, you hear Trump talking about how he predicted 9/11, but in an interview with Fox News, he takes things to a whole different level, and for what reason? All evidence points toward the fact that in no way did Trump predict 9/11 as he claims.

1. ¨[He] Knew what’s happening¨ (2:36)

Donald Trump predicted that Osama Bin Laden would construct a terrorist attack. Throughout the video, Trump talks about how he wrote a book that predicted that this would happen. The book came out one year before the attacks. But the Washington Post said this, ¨Here’s a 1999 CNN headline: ‘Bin Laden feared to be planning terrorist attack.”’ The article stated: “U.S. officials fear that suspected terrorist Osama Bin Laden ‘may be in the final stages’ of planning an attack against the United States.” The Chicago Tribune said, ¨ …Trump did not explicitly tie that threat to al-Qaeda and thought an attack might come through a miniaturized weapon of mass destruction, like a nuclear device in a suitcase or anthrax.¨ All Trump said was ¨ [H]ow the attack would make the world trade center bombing look small.¨ So he didn’t know who would make the attack or even what would really happen. Anyone could have predicted this and lots of people already were because the CIA and President Clinton were doing lots of things in their power to stop Bin Laden.

2. ¨I talk about Osama in my book and people cant believe it.¨ (7:52)

Osama Bin Laden was world enemy number one according to Trump. Trump believes that he knew and was the first to know about Bin Laden. ¨I said, ‘You have to kill him. You have to take him out.’ Nobody listened to me.” Trump added that people said to him, “’You predicted that Osama Bin Laden had to be killed before he knocked down the World Trade Center.’ It’s true.”’ Although when you go look into his book, all it says about Osama is ¨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.¨ He never said anything about taking him out before the attacks. Also Bin Laden was only 1 out of the 38 terrorists in his book that he talked about according to Factcheck.org. But how would Trump even know about Bin Laden? Trump was never the first one to know about Bin Laden. According to Forbes,¨[R]eports from as early as 1999 prove a possible bin Laden attack was on the radar for U.S. officials.¨ We know this is true because in 1998 Clinton sent Jet fighters to Afghanistan to ¨Protect our citizens from future attacks.¨ This is also where Trump got the idea of jet fighters. So, even presidents and people with power before him wanted to stop Bin Laden.

3. ¨[He] could’ve stopped it.¨ 2:45

Trump also believes he could have stopped it, if he were president. When this video came out, Trump was trying to run for president and that was the main reason for the interview. In the video Trump never says how he would stop the attacks either because he knew many people before him had already done many things and the attack still happened. For example President Clinton, in 1998, sent U.S jet fighters to destroy a nerve gas lab in Afghanistan that Bin Laden had been associated with so he couldn’t use it in the U.S. Clinton knew he was a problem so he pressured him out of Sudan. Also, according to the Chicago Tribune, the CIA had a unit entirely dedicated to Bin Laden going back to the mid-1990s. So many people were already trying to stop him before he made the attacks. If Trump was our president, what would he have done to try and stop it? We already had troops looking for Bin Laden and he was being tracked down so our country really couldn’t be doing anything more to try and stop the attacks that so many people were predicting.  

4. ¨He told me I actually predicted it.¨ (1:50)

Trump makes accurate claims, but this is only according to him. He thinks he’s good at predicting what is going on and that’s why he could write a book and confidently say he predicted 9/11. Although ¨Over 20,000. That’s how many false or misleading claims Trump has made just during his first presidential term, according to an ongoing tracker from the Washington Post. ¨ So even after he got in office, he still was not truthful. But even at the time of the attacks, Trump couldn’t even keep his story straight about where he was. The Washington Post has said ¨He usually says he was in Trump Tower, which is four miles from where the World Trade Center was, though, in his most recent remarks, he says he was in ‘a building in Midtown Manhattan’ after apparently being at home (Trump Tower) when the first plane struck.¨ In our video, he says he was in his tower, but in another interview ,he says ¨he was on the ground helping people¨ and other times he’s said ¨[H]e sent his people to go help¨. Trump has also said ¨[He] watched people jump from the towers¨. Which people did jump but how would he see them if he was in his tower 4 miles away. So many claims Trump has made have not been truthful so his claims are not accurate because he has proven in the past to not be right. 

5. ¨[Bush] said our country was safe, well that’s not the case.¨ (3:34)

Our country wasn’t prepared. In the video, Trump bashes Bush for not dealing with Bin Laden. Even another former president, Clinton has said ¨[W]e couldn’t legally bring him in.¨ At this point, Clinton and Bush had done everything he could to stop Bin Laden’s Projects, but Bin Laden was a ghost and Clinton couldn’t legally bring him in. Also, our country has the best military in the world who train all the time for things like 9/11. They were even overseas looking for Bin Laden. According to the Chicago Tribune, ¨ [The] CIA [already had] a unit entirely dedicated to bin Laden going back to the mid-1990s.¨ We have frontline workers who are in school for years in case of something like this. So, our country really couldn’t be more prepared for an attack. On the planes, it was civilians who had not been trained to deal with a crisis like this. But, even these civilians were able to stop one of the planes. If we didn’t destroy some of Bin Laden’s labs, this could have been a nuclear strike which used to be a drill in schools. So, people were prepared, but the idea that this could happen to our country was too hard to think about.

All For The Votes

O’Neill didn’t announce he was the one who killed Bin Laden until 15 years after. He wanted to remain unnamed so that families had time to cope. When he finally announced that he was the one who did it, he was at the 9/11 museum with families who had lost loved ones. O’Neill donated the shirt he wore during the raid and some money to a charity at the museum. Unlike O’Neill, Trump made so many claims about how he could have stopped it or he predicted it that he wasn’t respectful to the families who have lost others. He never gave any money to charities to help during the attacks. Even today Trump still brings it up every chance he can when in no way did he predict the attack nor could he have stopped it. He uses it as a political advantage to try and get people to believe he is smart and knows when huge situations like this are going to happen. He tries to get new voters to vote for him so that he can have more votes than his opponent.

Featured Image is a screenshot from the video ¨Trump Vs. Busch 9/11 Attacks¨

Second Image is a screenshot from the video ¨Trump Vs. Busch 9/11 Attacks¨