On October 13, 2020, Trump retweeted a QAnon conspiracy that claimed that Barack Obama and Joe Biden faked Osama bin Laden’s death in 2011. The account he retweeted was soon after deleted.
Trump also retweeted a video that claimed Iran was paid off to safely transfer bin Laden to Pakistan for Obama’s “trophy kill.”
Osama bin Laden’s niece, Noor bin Laden, voiced support for Trump, claiming that only he could prevent another terrorist attack like 9/11. On the day of 9/11, Trump bragged about the height of his Manhattan tower.
Noor, born in Switzerland, is a vocal fan of American conservative news and talk show hosts, naming Fox News’ Tucker Carlson to be her favorite television personality. She has also voiced support for the QAnon conspiracy theory. Trump has voiced support for other politicians who have espoused the conspiracy.
Trump has made the claim multiple times, such during his campaign on the Alex Jones Radio Show, on Twitter, and after the raid on ISIS leader al-Baghdadi when he claimed that the event was more important than the death of bin Laden. Trump did in fact mention Osama bin Laden in his 2000 book The America We Deserve in the context of how the Clinton administration was mishandling multiple threats, referencing a 1998 air strike on bin Laden’s compound. While Trump originally asserted that no one had heard of bin Laden, he was a well-known and reported on threat at the time, which owed to the reasoning behind the airstrikes in the first place. Trump’s book also did warn of a large terror attack, although this was already the driving force of concern about bin Laden and other possible sources of terrorism.
Of course we should have captured Osama Bin Laden long before we did. I pointed him out in my book just BEFORE the attack on the World Trade Center. President Clinton famously missed his shot. We paid Pakistan Billions of Dollars & they never told us he was living there. Fools!..
Trump said, “this is the biggest there is. This is the worst ever. Osama bin Laden was big, but Osama bin Laden became big with the World Trade Center. This is a man who built a whole, as he would like to call it, a country.” He went on to repeat a past claim that he had warned of bin Laden a year before his attack on the World Trade Center, but never received due credit.
Trump claimed at an Alabama rally that he watched thousands cheer on 9/11, ostensibly Muslims.
I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.
He later doubled down on his claim when questioned about its validity, citing a 2001 Washington Post story by Serge Kovaleski.
In Jersey City, within hours of two jetliners’ plowing into the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.
Serge Kovaleski retorted that his writing of the alleged “number of people” was not the hundreds and thousands Trump claimed, nor would it be possible for Trump to have personally witnessed as much.
Now, the poor guy, you’ve got to see this guy: “Uhh, I don’t know what I said. Uhh, I don’t remember,” he’s going like “I don’t remember. Maybe that’s what I said.”
When Trump was asked about whether his building sustained any damage in the September 11 attacks, he bragged about its size saying, “I mean, 40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually before the World Trade Center the tallest, and then when they built the World Trade Center it became known as the second-tallest, and now it’s the tallest.” His building was still not the tallest.
