Trump Sends Warning to Taliban on 9/11 Anniversary
President Trump honored the memory of the victims on the 18th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks Wednesday by sending a grim warning to the Taliban terrorist group, which claimed responsibility for the death of an American soldier last week.
“For every American who lived through that day, the September 11 attack is seared into our soul,” Trump said at the Pentagon during a ceremony marking the anniversary. “It was a day filled with shock, horror, sorrow and righteous fury.”
Trump called off a meeting planned for last Sunday at Camp David with Taliban leaders and representatives of the Afghanistan government after the Taliban claimed its members had carried out a suicide bombing Thursday in Kabul that killed twelve people, including a U.S. soldier.
“They thought they would use this attack to show strength but what they actually showed is unrelenting weakness,” the president said. “We have hit our enemy harder than they have ever been hurt before and that will continue. If for any reason they come back to our country, we will go wherever they are and use power the likes of which the United States has never used before — and I’m not talking about nuclear power. They will never have seen anything like what will happen to them.”
Trump, a New Yorker, also recalled his own experience of the World Trade Center attacks, saying he went down to the wreckage afterwards to help.
“It was then that I realized the world was going to change. It was no longer going to be, and it could never ever be that innocent place that I thought it was,” he said of watching the towers burn on television. “Soon after, I went down to Ground Zero with men who worked for me to try to help in any little way that we could. We were not alone.”
The president and First Lady also held a moment of silence on the South Lawn of the White House at 8:46 a.m., the moment the first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
