Trump Claims He 'Took Out' Osama Bin Laden Again Despite Established Account Of US Special Forces Operation

Donald Trump stood at the White House podium on 6 April 2026 and implied, for at least the third time on record, that he deserves credit for the death of Osama bin Laden — a man killed by US Navy SEALs on the orders of President Barack Obama in May 2011.

The remarks came during a press conference about the rescue of two American airmen shot down over Iran, during which Trump listed what he described as his personal foreign policy achievements. Transitioning from his account of ordering the 2020 killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, Trump said: 'I did one other, but this one was not picked up: Osama bin Laden.' He then pointed to his year 2000 book, 'The America We Deserve,' claiming it called for bin Laden to be 'taken out' before the 11 September 2001 attacks. The book does not say that.

Trump's Exact Words at the 6 April 2026 Press Conference

The press conference, broadcast live and documented in full by PBS NewsHour, opened with Trump recounting the rescue of two airmen from Iranian soil after an F-15E Strike Eagle was shot down during the US military's Operation Epic Fury.

Flanked by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Trump described the operation as 'one of the largest, most complex, most harrowing combat searches ever attempted by the military.'

He then pivoted to what he cast as a personal catalogue of foreign policy successes. After correctly noting that he ordered the killing of Soleimani in January 2020, Trump said: 'And I also, I did one other, but this one was not picked up, Osama bin Laden. If you read my book, I said you got to take him out, one year before the World Trade Center came down, so I wish you'd read the book. But as a president, to be a good president, I believe you have to have good instincts, and a lot of this is instinct.'

The grammatical structure of his statement; placing bin Laden's name directly after Soleimani's and prefacing it with 'I did one other,' led numerous observers to interpret the remark as a direct claim of credit for the killing. PolitiFact and CNN assessed Trump's intended meaning as a reference to his book's alleged warning, rather than a literal claim of ordering the 2011 raid. Either interpretation, however, relies on a passage that does not exist as Trump describes it.

What 'The America We Deserve' Says About Bin Laden

Trump's 2000 book, ghostwritten with journalist Dave Shiflett, contains a single reference to Osama bin Laden. PolitiFact has tracked down and verified this passage against the original text every time Trump has recycled this claim since 2015. The passage reads: 'One day we're told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin-Laden is public enemy number one, and US jet fighters 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.'

That sentence is a critique of what Trump viewed as the Clinton administration's short attention span on foreign policy threats. It contains no directive to kill, capture, or 'take out' bin Laden. It offers no intelligence assessment.

According to FactCheck.org's Eugene Kiely, the passage 'doesn't warn we better be careful with this guy named Osama bin Laden. It doesn't say the U.S. better take him out.' It is, as Kiely has written, an illustration of erratic foreign policy priorities, not a prescient warning.

There is a further factual problem with Trump's framing. Bin Laden was not an obscure or newly identified threat in January 2000, when the book was published. The CIA had been hunting him actively since the mid-1990s. He had been designated the agency's most-wanted terrorist target. His operatives had bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, killing 224 people.

A Decade-Old Lie That Has Never Changed Its Substance

This is not the first time Trump has made this claim, nor the second. PolitiFact first debunked it in December 2015 after Trump claimed in an interview with Alex Jones that his book warned the government to 'take out' bin Laden. PolitiFact returned to it again in October 2019 when Trump repeated it at a campaign event. CNN debunked it again in October 2025 when Trump made the same claim at a US Navy birthday celebration, this time adding that he had told Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth bin Laden should have been taken out in 2000 — a detail with no corroboration.

The social media reaction to the 6 April version was swift. Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief at Meidas Touch, posted on X that 'Trump claims he was the one who took out Osama bin Laden.' Tom Nichols, professor emeritus at the US Naval War College and staff writer at The Atlantic, replied: 'And we just all pretend it's normal and this is not a sign of serious, alarming cognitive issues.' Newsweek noted the White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The pattern matters beyond the factual errors themselves. Each iteration of the claim arrives in a different context, a Navy celebration, a campaign rally, a war press conference, but the underlying structure is identical: Trump positions himself as having identified a threat that others ignored, implies the killing would not have happened without him, and blurs the distinction between having written about a name in a book and ordering a military operation. The book passage, when read in full, does not even constitute a warning. It is a parenthetical illustration.

Eleven years after fact-checkers first dismantled this claim line by line, the sitting president of the United States returned to it at a White House podium — and the text of his 2000 book still contains no advice, no directive, and no prescience about Osama bin Laden whatsoever.