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In typical Trump fashion, the twice-impeached disgrace is now rewriting history to attack his successor’s handling of the Trump Withdrawal Plan from Afghanistan.
In April, of course, Trump called Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal “wonderful” and “positive.” His only problem was that Biden wasn’t getting out fast enough.
And just last month, at a rally in Sarasota, Florida, Trump took full credit for the withdrawal, including the fact that his negotiations with the Taliban and aggressive drawdown of troops had effectively tied Biden’s hands: “I started the process, all the troops are coming back home, they couldn’t stop the process. 21 years is enough…. They couldn’t stop the process, they wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process... yeah, thank you, thank you…. we’re bringing our troops back home!”
And for once, at that rally in Sarasota, Trump was actually telling the truth.
As Biden said in a statement on August 14:
When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on U.S. Forces. Shortly before he left office, he also drew U.S. Forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500. Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our Forces and our allies’ Forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict. I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.
Trump, of course, had made a surprise campaign promise in 2020 to bring all the troops home by Christmas. But just like the healthcare proposal he kept in his pocket or the middle-class tax breaks he assured us were coming after the 2018 midterms, that plan failed to materialize.
In 2018, Trump had released Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in order to speed up his peace talks and in 2019 he invited the Taliban terrorists to celebrate 9/11 with him at Camp David before he was forced to cancel the plan “after a bombing… in Kabul that killed 12 people, including an American soldier.”
Then in 2020, Trump gave the most Putin-friendly answers possible when asked why he had done nothing to challenge Russia for allegedly offering “bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan -- including targeting American troops.”
None of this will stop Trump from “forgetting” what really happened in 2018, 2019 and 2020. Or what he said about the withdrawal to his cheering fans in Florida last month.
Former Secretary of State and Rapture cosplayer Mike Pompeo has also developed a sudden case of amnesia about his role in the plan.
And Ronna McDaniel is busy scrubbing the RNC website of all its past lavish praise for Trump’s withdrawal plan.
Both sides—and the American people—wanted to bring the troops home and end the war in Afghanistan.
As President, Biden refused to prolong a failed mission that lacked public support, saying this weekend: “One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country. And an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me.”
As Jim Golby wrote in The Atlantic in January 2021: “The situation was already bad, but (Trump) made it worse—just in time to hand the problem to President-elect Joe Biden.”
As much as Trump and the GOP try to rewrite history after the fact, the Trump Withdrawal Plan was put in place before Biden took office and, in Trump’s own words in July 2021, even if he wanted to, Biden “couldn’t stop the process.”
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