President Donald Trump took time out from his relaxing holiday weekend at Mar-a-Lago to repost a racist claim about Afghans made by a former Navy SEAL.
With his approval ratings continuing to fall, Trump hit the fairway for a few rounds of golf with Canadian ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. The president also found time to post a screenshot of an X post by former Navy SEAL Robert J. O’Neill, who has claimed sole responsibility for killing Osama bin Laden.
“If you’ve never been to Afghanistan, you wouldn’t understand,” O’Neill’s post reads. ”If you showed these people a Nespresso machine and gave them free coffee, they would assume you were a witch and chop your head off… But let’s bring ’em in!”
O’Neill’s post is a reaction to the backlash surrounding the Trump administration’s decision to stop processing visas for Afghan nationals in response to the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington D.C. on Wednesday. The suspect involved in the shooting is a 29-year-old Afghan national who sought asylum in the U.S.
In response to the shooting, and the subsequent death of 20-year-old Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, Trump promised that the “animal” responsible would “pay a very steep price.”
The Trump administration was quick to blame President Joe Biden for the shooter’s presence in the country because he fled Afghanistan for the U.S. in 2021. His asylum application was approved this year, during Trump’s second term in office.
Undeterred, Trump has decided to punish Afghans collectively, writing posts on Truth Social about “hundreds of thousands” of people pouring into the U.S. from Afghanistan, “totally unvetted and unchecked.”
Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome resettled some 85,000 Afghans—many of whom had worked with American forces in Afghanistan—in the U.S. after Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021.
O’Neill, the author of the post Trump shared, has a checkered history, attracting controversy for claiming sole responsibility for the death of Osama bin Laden as part of Operation Neptune Spear in 2011.
According to a former SEAL Team 6 member, however, by the time O’Neill saw bin Laden, he had already been shot in the chest and leg. Another former team member told The Intercept that it was only at that point that O’Neill then shot bin Laden in the head. The government has never confirmed the exact version of events.
Despite supporting the president, O’Neill previously clashed with Trump after he reposted a conspiracy theory about a body double being killed in the raid instead of bin Laden.
“Very brave men said goodbye to their kids to go kill Osama bin Laden‚” O’Neill wrote on X at the time. “We were given the order by President Obama. It was not a body double. Thank you Mr. President.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
