President Donald Trump likes to portray himself as a visionary, someone who sees important things before others. Trump has been claiming for the last decade that in a book he published the year before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he warned the authorities that they needed to deal with Osama bin Laden
Trump’s claim is false. His 2000 book contained no warning at all about bin Laden. His tale about the book’s nonexistent warning was conclusively debunked in 2015. CNN published another debunking when he revived the tale in 2019.
But the president repeated it once again on Sunday – to a crowd of sailors celebrating the 250th birthday of the US Navy.
This time, Trump delivered the phony narrative after saying history wouldn’t forget how it was Navy Seals who killed bin Laden (in 2011 under then-President Barack Obama, a frequent target of Trump criticism). Trump added, in an apparent ad-lib, “And please remember, I wrote about Osama bin Laden exactly one year ago,” then corrected himself and said, “One year before he blew up the World Trade Center. And I said, ‘You’ve got to watch Osama bin Laden.’ And the fake news would never let me get away with that statement unless it was true.”
How many people in our country think this is normal now? Or this?
