Secular Talk: Trump Calls For Restarting Afghanistan War

This has been painful to watch.

It hardly comes as a surprise though. This is why Trump won Independent voters in 2016, but decisively lost them in the 2020 election. He says one thing and does another. He bloviates and can’t be trusted. In our case, we have been done with Trump since the Syria strike in early 2017.

Donald Trump was briefly interesting to us when he was condemning the endless wars, giving heart attacks to neocons and running against the rest of the Republican field. He even called NATO obsolete during the 2016 campaign. He campaigned on better foreign relations with Russia.

As president, Donald Trump deferred to Senate Republicans and the Pentagon on foreign policy. He gave Israel virtually everything that Netanyahu wanted including Jonathan Pollard. He showered the Pentagon with increased military spending. He launched air strikes on Syria. He imposed sanctions on Russia. He tore up the Iran Deal and assassinated Qasem Soleimani for Senate Republicans. He surrounded himself with failed generals like H.R. McMaster and “Mad Dog” Mattis and took their advice and substituted their judgment for his own. He hired John Bolton as his national security adviser. He had Jared Kushner running his campaign. He ordered a withdrawal from Syria only to get talked out of it. He hired Mike Pompeo as his Secretary of State who negotiated the “conditions based” withdrawal from Afghanistan which we now know he had no intention of honoring. By the end of his presidency, it was impossible to believe anything he said because he had repeatedly done the opposite of what he had promised to do.

We elected Donald Trump in order to get Lindsey Graham’s foreign policy. MAGA devolved into a grift and a cult of personality years ago. It is worth noting that the GOP is deeply divided on the issue though. A third of Republican voters still that believe that withdrawing from Afghanistan was the right decision. It was the “own the libs” crowd which has flip flipped and who have changed their tune because their cult leader has a new position on Afghanistan. Those people don’t have any firm beliefs.

Note: Trump’s position on Afghanistan isn’t unprecedented. The Iran Deal was the worst deal in history because Obama negotiated it. Even though the Iran Deal was working and had reduced tensions with Iran, Trump tore it up and escalated tensions with Iran in order to “own the libs.”