Fact-check dismantles Trump claim America was terrorism-free on his watch

During a campaign speech on Saturday, November 11, 2024 GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump claimed that the United States was free of terrorist attacks when he was in the White House. Trump has been trying to convince voters that President Joe Biden is weak on national security, and that unlike Biden, he kept the U.S. safe for four years.

But Peter Bergen, a CNN national security analyst, tears Trump's claim apart in an op-ed published on November 14. Under Trump's presidency, Bergen stresses, the U.S. was attacked by Islamist extremists as well as by far-right white supremacists and white nationalists.

"Despite Trump's much-vaunted travel ban," Bergen explains, "there was plenty of terrorism on his watch as the 45th president of the United States. On October 31, 2017, Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbek resident of the U.S. who was inspired by ISIS, plowed a truck into a group of pedestrians in Manhattan, killing eight and wounding 11…. During Trump's presidency, there were also multiple lethal attacks by far-right terrorists — most notably on August 3, 2019, when a white nationalist went on a shooting rampage at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killing 23 people who he believed were Hispanic immigrants, according to the U.S. Department of Justice."

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Bergen continues, "Also, the most lethal antisemitic attack ever in the United States took place on October 27, 2018, when a terrorist killed eleven people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh."

The CNN national security analyst emphasizes that Trump is ignoring or downplaying acts of terrorism committed by white supremacists.

"It seems, at least in Trump's mind, that lethal acts of terrorism carried out by far-right terrorists don't count as terrorism," Bergen argues. "Trump, of course, also helped to instigate one of the most spectacular acts of domestic terrorism in American history when he egged on a mob of thousands of his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, which triggered a riot that injured 114 Capitol Police officers, according to a bipartisan U.S. Senate investigation. The riot also led to the deaths of five people."

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Peter Bergen's full op-ed for CNN is available at this link.