St. Donald of Orange is not having a sedate Easter week right now, despite all the Jesusonian comparisons his evangelical friends are making. No, he certainly isn’t. He appeared Tuesday in New York for his historic arraignment and now it’s Thursday and he is thundering about “morons in the White House.”
The White House on Thursday released a report about the decisions made regarding the 2021Â U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, including the bombing at the Kabul airport that killed 13 U.S. service members.
The 12-page report by the National Security Council summarizes the administration’s assessment of the withdrawal and largely blamed former President Donald Trump’s administration for the chaos that unfolded as U.S. troops were leaving and as Americans and Afghans evacuated from the country. The Taliban took over the country’s government and have remained in power.
“President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor,” the report said.
You know that’s enough to send Trumpty screaming up the walls. And of course he did just that.
When Trump took office in 2017, more than 10,000 U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan, the report said, and he continued to order drawdowns over his final year in office, bringing the total down to about 2,500.
But the Trump administration “provided no plans for how to conduct the final withdrawal or to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies,” the White House said. “President Biden had committed to ending the war in Afghanistan, but when he came into office he was confronted with difficult realities left to him by the Trump Administration.”
The article goes on to say how the lack of communication from the Trump administration when Trump refused the usual transition communication between administrations hamstrung the situation significantly. In point of fact, I’m not sure it would have mattered what Trump communicated because he had no plan. He had a date to withdraw from Afghanistan and no plan to do so. Like everything Trump attempted while in office, his activities in Afghanistan were half baked and amateurish and only led to further problems for a regular administration to deal with after he was gone.
My sense of it always was that the Taliban were able to take over in nine days because the Afghan forces were demoralized, due to the fact that they saw themselves being set up for defeat by Trump withdrawing troops constantly, but providing no further guidance. I always believed that they simply gave up, because they were directionless and they knew they were going to receive no direction from Washington with Trump in power.
Now we have another flash point in the culture war. Look for a lot of yelling and screaming over this one.
I thought the many dark clouds overhead were Stormy weather, now I see it’s just vast numbers of chickens coming home to roost.
I’ve thought this from the beginning – that TFG had set up the Afghanistan withdrawal to be a complete shitshow. After Pompeo released all the Taliban fighters being held as prisoners by the then government of Afghanistan, there was no way for this to end well.
The transition, or rather lack of one was still more of the yet to be calculated damage Trump did to our country. You noted with Afghanistan Trump had no plan. I beg to slightly differ. He’d wanted to withdraw completely for years but DOD was trying to slow all that down to prevent exactly what happened from happening. Like you and I Trump probably remembers those final frantic days of the fall of Saigon, and those haunting scenes of Operation Eagle Pull (the official name assigned to the task) of that last helicopter taking off from the Embassy roof, and aircraft being pushed over the sides of ships. Maybe he’d forgotten but I’ll be they showed him pictures and thirty seconds or so of video. So given the one skill he had which is a measure of PR savvy he decided to hold off until after the election because he believed what he was being told that in the end those scenes would be replayed no matter how well a final withdrawal was planned. And what we saw in Afghanistan during those final hours and after was inevitable. I could explain why it went down like it did but it would take a long time.
So Trump’s plan as it were was to wait until AFTER the election. Then, when he got his ass kicked he decided two things – first that he’d dump the whole mess in Biden’s lap and second he’d put his minions to work hamstringing Biden and the DOD as much as possible. Pure Trumpian vidictiveness.
As for the transition in general I think Trump’s orders to everyone in the executive branch to either refuse to talk to the Biden people or if they did be as unhelpful as possible was for a truly appalling reason. Trump and his political appointees didn’t know shit. They didn’t know what the fuck was going on. The job all along had been not to conduct the business of cabinet agencies but to, if not dismantle them then get rid of as many people who actually knew shit, who knew how to do their jobs and strove to do them well AND replace them with know-nothing Trump hacks. Kool=Aid gulpers who were delighted to collect govt. salaries and benefits and if they did anything at all it was to fuck things up.
So, Team Trump didn’t want to work with Biden’s transition team because they were fucking clueless!
45 released 4000 Taliban. 4000!!! He set up the date for the U.S. military to leave – Biden extended it. 45 was never intelligent enough to be POTUS.
Everything that fat ass did while in office was done knowing that he would not be reelected and was done to cause havoc in the next administration.
All republiCLOWNS are actively working to destroy America from within…..