Among the many things Donald Trump wants Americans to believe about his vast and impressive powers is his ability to predict the future. In fact, in recent days, the president has emphasized a specific detail about his record of prognostications.
Late last week, for example, he told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade that he predicted the rise of Osama bin Laden. “I said, ‘You have to go out and kill Osama bin Laden. He’s big trouble. Kill him.’ Nobody did anything,” the president said. “A year later, he knocked down the World Trade Center. Do you know that? It was in a book. Did you know that I wrote it in a book? One of my many bestsellers.”
On Monday, Trump said it again, linking his alleged prediction from the 1990s to a related prediction about the Strait of Hormuz.
“I knew about the strait, that it would be a weapon, which I predicted a long time ago, predicted all of this stuff,” he boasted, adding, “I predicted Osama bin Laden would knock out the World Trade Center. I made that prediction a year before he did it. I said, ‘You better get him. He’s a bad guy.’ I watched him be interviewed one time and I said, ‘That’s a bad guy, you better get him,’ one year before exactly; I wrote it in a book.”
As is too often the case, Trump was referencing events that only occurred in his overactive imagination. He has told this falsehood several times before, but The Associated Press and CNN separately scrutinized the claims and found that Trump’s book made no predictions about bin Laden, no matter how often the president has pretended otherwise.
But as tiresome as it was to see the president peddle nonsensical boasts that have long been discredited, let’s not brush past the other point he raised about his powers of prognostication: “I knew about the strait, that it would be a weapon.”
This hasn’t help Trump at all. In fact, whether the president understands this or not, it has made his troubles worse, not better.
To be sure, the strait has effectively been weaponized, which in turn has created economic problems for countries around the world, including the United States, increasing costs on everything from oil to food to semiconductors.
To hear the president tell it, he knew this would happen. That’s easy to believe, given recent reporting that U.S. military leaders, including Gen. Dan Caine, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told him in advance that this was an all but certain development after the start of the war.
But Trump’s boast from Monday has led to a series of inevitable questions that the White House appears unable answer: If he predicted the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, why wasn’t his administration better prepared? Why not establish partnerships in advance with regional and military allies? Why not emphasize oil reserves before launching the military offensive?
Last week, MS NOW spoke with former Navy officers and maritime experts who marveled at the Republican administration’s failure to anticipate the events that Trump has said he saw coming. Sal Mercogliano, a maritime historian and professor at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and Campbell University, told the network, “I’m kind of floored by the fact that the administration failed to plan or have any guidance in place for what to do with the commercial shipping.”
Retired Army Gen. Mark Hertling, an MS NOW national security contributor, added that the White House’s rush to war apparently did not allow for enough resources to be moved to the region.
“It’s just a lack of understanding fueled by Hegseth and Trump not understanding how the military works,” he said.
If the president said he had no idea what to expect, that would be a problem. But the fact that he has insisted that he saw all of this coming, and simply failed to properly prepare, makes that problem even worse.
