Last updated on July 18th, 2023 at 01:39 pm
During an interview with Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld, former President Donald Trump insisted that President Joe Biden’s handling of the evacuation from Afghanistan was a “travesty.” He drew spurious connections between Afghanistan and security along the United States-Mexico border.
“I don’t know if he is a nice president,” Trump said. “But I can tell you the country has never been more unsafe – we have people pouring in through the southern border, which people are forgetting about because of the travesty of Afghanistan.”
“The only thing good for them about Afghanistan is it makes what they’re doing at the border look good,” he said. “Because that was the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. ‘We don’t want a wall, we don’t want this, just let people come through’. It’s a disaster. It was the safest border we ever had.”
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Trump claimed that the Taliban, who seized control of the country last month, do not “fear” Biden.
“They don’t fear [Biden],” he said, recalling his negotiations with Taliban co-founder Abdul Baradar, who is currently the acting first deputy prime minister of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
“It’s a question of respect and being smart: I dealt with Abdul — He’s now the head of Taliban and was the head of the Taliban when I dealt with him,” he said. “I started off very tough. ‘You’re going to pay tremendous consequences…’ It was bad – and they understood what I said – and there was no way they were going to do anything to us – we could have taken our time, one year or two years [to withdraw].”
President Biden has defended his administration’s response, saying that the U.S. mission in Afghanistan was never intended “to have been nation building,†insisting it had always been about “preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland†and “never supposed to be creating a unified centralized democracy.â€
Trump’s administration had proposed leaving Afghanistan by January 15, 2021.
“By May, it is President Trump’s hope that they will all come home safely — and in their entirety,†then-national security adviser Robert O’Brien said at the time. “I want to reiterate that this policy is not new. This has been the president’s policy since he took office.â€
Trump was largely supportive of an Afghanistan withdrawal. In April, he put himself at odds with other Republicans when he suggested that American troops should leave Afghanistan ahead of President Joe Biden’s proposed deadline of September 11. The evacuation was completed ahead of an August 31 deadline.
Alan is a writer, editor, and news junkie based in New York.
