wo weeks before the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Trump is out there claiming bin Laden “only” did one terrorist attack, and that he wasn’t a “monster.”
Speaking to radio host
Hugh Hewitt on Thursday, the following words actually
came out of the ex-president’s mouth: “We took out the founder of ISIS, [Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi, and then of course
[Iranian military leader Qassem] Soleimani. Now just so you understand, Soleimani is bigger by many, many times than Osama bin Laden. The founder of ISIS is bigger by many, many times—al-Baghdadi—than Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden had one hit, and it was a bad one, in New York City, the World Trade Center. But these other two guys were monsters. They were monsters. And I kept saying for years, why aren’t they getting them? For years, I said it. I got them. The press doesn’t talk about it. They don’t talk about it because they don’t want to talk about it.”
There’s a lot to unpack here but we should probably start with the fact that while Trump is trying to claim that bin Laden was some kind of one-hit wonder for terrorist attacks, the reality is that he was actually also linked to the
1998 U.S. embassy bombings that killed more than 200 people and the 2000
bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 U.S. Navy sailors. Then there’s the bizarre way he talks about 9/11, where you can tell he doesn’t really want to admit its magnitude because that would somehow undermine his argument, so he begrudgingly calls it a “bad one.” And, of course, there’s the assertion that al-Baghdadi and Soleimani were “monsters,” but bin Laden—the man responsible for the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history—not so much. Which may be news to the families of the 2,977 victims killed that day.
Meanwhile, the sickest part here—aside from trying to claim bin Laden gets a bad rap—is that Trump is
undoubtedly saying all this because
Barack Obama oversaw the operation that killed bin Laden, and he’s pathologically jealous of the guy. Also because he’s a stunted man-child and needs people to pat him on the head and tell him he did a great job and it kills him that, supposedly, “the press doesn’t talk about it.”
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