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."

Two things about that.

It is already illegal in Florida

Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 1471 on April 6, 2026, explicitly banning it. According to the Governor's Office, the law "reinforces that Florida courts may not apply or enforce foreign or religious law if doing so would violate constitutional rights," and "blocks foreign judgments, contracts, or legal provisions that attempt to bypass those protections."

Donalds is running to succeed DeSantis. He is campaigning on stopping a thing his own party's governor banned five months ago, in a bill Donalds could have simply cited.

That is what the top item on his counterterrorism list actually is: a bill signing he could have taken credit for, repackaged as an urgent threat.

It had nothing to do with the actual attacks

Florida's connection to September 11 is real, and it is documented, and it is not this.

Several of the hijackers lived in Florida in the run-up to the attacks. Some of them trained on flight simulators there. Sharia law was not on the books in Florida in 2001, and no part of the 9/11 Commission's findings turned on it.

The thing former Florida Senator Bob Graham spent years fighting to get released was the "28 pages" — a section withheld from the 2002 congressional Joint Inquiry into the attacks, which Graham co-chaired, and not from the 9/11 Commission report that followed two years later. He believed the pages would reveal America's "true relationship with Saudi Arabia" — the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden. They came out in 2016, and do not appear to have changed much in the U.S.–Saudi relationship since.

Donalds did get closer to the actual finding elsewhere in the same appearance. "A lot of 9/11 was really information flow, or lack thereof," he said. "We had agencies that were siloing information at the federal level. People were not talking." That is, broadly, what the 9/11 Commission concluded.

He put it second. First was a religious legal tradition that is banned in his state and was absent from the attack.

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 — in a state whose own Sharia ban was thrown out as unconstitutional after a federal appeals court ruled against it. 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.

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 — which Ron DeSantis banned in Florida in April 2026, and which had no role in the 2001 attacks that several of the hijackers planned while living in Florida. He then told the audience that Democrats are "playing footsie with the radical Islamists." He is asking to run the state, and his top counterterrorism priority is a ban that already exists.

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.