Days before the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001, Byron Donalds stood at a town hall in The Villages and posed a question to the room about protecting Florida from another attack like it.

Donalds, the Republican nominee for governor of Florida, answered it himself:

"Now, how do you prepare Florida for the potential of another 9/11? The No. 1 thing I would say is we cannot have Sharia law take a foothold in our state. Absolutely not. Absolutely not."

Sharia law had nothing to do with September 11.

What actually caused the attacks, according to the people who investigated them

The 9/11 Commission spent twenty months on the question Donalds asked. Its answer is on the first page of the report's executive summary: the pain "was inflicted by 19 young Arabs acting at the behest of Islamist extremists headquartered in distant Afghanistan," and "the 9/11 attack was driven by Usama Bin Ladin."

That is a terrorist organization operating out of a foreign country. It is not a body of religious law, and no religious legal code let it into the United States.

The Commission was equally specific about what went wrong on this end. "Across the government, there were failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management." Four categories, named in a single sentence. Not one of them is a court doctrine, a statute, or a religious tradition. They are descriptions of what the federal government failed to do: it did not take the threat seriously enough, did not build the tools to counter it, and did not share what it knew across agencies.

Donalds knows this. He said it himself, at the same town hall, right after the Sharia line.

"A lot of 9/11 was really information flow, or lack thereof. We had agencies that were siloing information at the federal level. People were not talking."

That is, broadly, the Commission's actual conclusion. He put it second. First was a religious legal tradition that appears nowhere in the finding.

Florida's real connection to the attacks is documented, and it is not this

The hijackers did spend time in Florida, which is part of what makes the substitution so stark. The Commission's account of how the plot was assembled puts three of the four pilots in one small Gulf Coast town. Mohamed Atta "started flight instruction at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida," and Marwan al Shehhi enrolled there with him. Ziad Jarrah "had already arranged to attend the Florida Flight Training Center (FFTC) in Venice, Florida." When the muscle hijackers arrived in 2001, "the majority settled in Florida."

They learned to fly at Florida flight schools, on student and tourist visas, in plain view. What a governor of Florida might have to say about that is a real subject. Nothing in it runs through Sharia law.

The one genuine 9/11 fight a Florida politician led was about a foreign government, not a foreign legal code. Former Senator Bob Graham spent years pushing to release the "28 pages" withheld from the 2002 congressional Joint Inquiry into the attacks, which he co-chaired. He believed they would reveal America's "true relationship with Saudi Arabia." They came out in 2016. Donalds did not mention them.

Sharia law has never been law anywhere in the United States

The second half of the claim is as empty as the first. There is no American jurisdiction where Sharia law is or has been in force, and the last state that tried to ban it could not produce an example of the thing it was banning.

Oklahoma voters passed a constitutional amendment barring state courts from considering Sharia in 2010. A federal appeals court blocked it. As the American Civil Liberties Union recorded at the time, the court wrote that the state's lawyers "do not identify any actual problem the challenged amendment seeks to solve," and that they "admitted...that they did not know of even a single instance where an Oklahoma court had applied Sharia law."

So the top item on Donalds's counterterrorism list is a threat the last state to legislate against it could not find a single instance of, aimed at an attack it played no part in.

Florida passed its own version anyway. Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 1471 on April 6, 2026, which the Governor's Office says "reinforces that Florida courts may not apply or enforce foreign or religious law if doing so would violate constitutional rights." Donalds is running to succeed DeSantis and is campaigning on stopping something his own party's governor already signed a bill about five months ago. That is embarrassing. It is also beside the point. A law against a thing that does not exist does not make the thing exist.

What he said next

Donalds did not stop at Florida law. He went after Democrats, who unlike Republicans, he said, are "playing footsie with the radical Islamists." Then he explained what he meant:

"We know what happens when you let radical Islam into your country. We have proof of it, looking at Western Europe today. Western Europe allowed radical Islam to take hold, and we're seeing, unfortunately, some things that are not working out for the European nations. We don't want that in Florida. We don't want that in America."

Strip out the softeners and the claim is that letting Muslims into a country is what causes terrorism, and that one American political party is on the terrorists' side. He offered no evidence for either, at a town hall, days before an anniversary that a lot of Americans mark by remembering people they lost.

This is a scripted party message, not one candidate's slip

Donalds is not improvising. He is reading from a message the Republican Party has spent real money building.

We documented the spending: Republicans put more than $10 million into making "Sharia" a campaign word, and a pollster found anti-Muslim sentiment in this country spikes during election cycles rather than after terrorist attacks.

The same message shows up all over this site's coverage. Oklahoma's Josh Brecheen warned a town hall about the Ottoman Empire, got laughed at, and then cosponsored a bill to bar anyone who adheres to Sharia from entering the country. Mike Rogers (MI) claimed his Muslim opponent "believes America deserved 9/11," a quote from a different person entirely; PolitiFact rated it Pants on Fire and noted the attack evokes anti-Muslim tropes.

Same word, same anniversary, same election year. The anniversary is the point. Attaching Sharia to September 11 is what gives the word its charge, and it is why the claim gets made in the first week of September rather than any other week of the year.

What the record shows

Days before the 25th anniversary of September 11, Byron Donalds told a town hall in The Villages that the number one way to protect Florida from another such attack is stopping Sharia law. The commission that investigated the attacks attributed them to al Qaeda and to four failures of the American government, none of which was a religious legal code. Three of the four hijacker pilots trained at flight schools in one Florida town, which Donalds did not mention. Sharia law has never been in force in any American state, and the last state to ban it could not name one case where a court had applied it. He then told the audience that Democrats are "playing footsie with the radical Islamists."

He is asking to run the state where the hijackers learned to fly, and his top counterterrorism priority is a thing that had no role in what they did.

Source

A.G. Gancarski, "Byron Donalds says the key to preventing another 9/11 is stopping Sharia law", Florida Politics, September 1, 2026. Photo: Florida Politics.