Sabotage in the White House: How Trump successfully orchestrated Biden’s “incompetence”

Photo by Sohaib Ghyasi on Unsplash

Republicans want to impeach Biden for the chaos that unfolded in Afghanistan during the first few days of the evacuation. Their cries have grown even louder since Isis-K sent a suicide bomber to Kabul airport. “Biden is incompetent,” they say.

Even Democrats have jumped on that bandwagon, blaming Biden for not beginning the evacuation sooner. We’ve all heard the heartbreaking stories of Afghan interpreters who’ve saved American lives only to be waiting for years for a visa. They say there is no excuse for this mismanagement. It must be Biden’s fault.

If Biden is impeached, Republicans should think about what that means for Trump. Every attempt Trump has made to sabotage Biden will be uncovered. And it won’t just be aired on liberal media or written up in articles published by The New York Times or The Washington Post where Trump’s cronies never venture. No, this time the truth will come out on live TV in front of the entire world.

We can’t predict the future, but we do know something about the past. In the rush to label Biden at fault for the events unfolding in Afghanistan, we should revisit some facts that our selective memory seems to have forgotten. 

 

Trump sabotaged Biden’s efforts to effectively transition into the presidency.

The job of President of the United States is arguably the hardest job in the world. That’s why each president (except Trump) has graciously given the incoming president and his team access to important information that will be needed to do the job effectively from the moment he takes office. Trump sabotaged that effort.

 

Trump gutted the SIV (Special Immigrant Visa Program).

According to Olivia Troye, former top national security adviser to Mike Pence, "Trump had FOUR years-while putting this plan in place-to evacuate these Afghan allies who were the lifelines for many of us who spent time in Afghanistan. They'd been waiting a long time. The process slowed to a trickle."

 

Trump announced our withdrawal from Afghanistan & made a deal with the Taliban

Trump even tried to invite the Taliban to the White House, which “stunned many of Trump’s top advisers.” Instead, then Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo traveled to Doha, Qatar to meet with one of the Taliban’s leaders.

According to Secretary Esper, “Mr. Trump had earlier ‘undermined’ the agreement through his barely disguised impatience to exit the country with little apparent regard for the consequences. That included an October 2020 declaration by Mr. Trump that he wanted the 5,000 American troops then in Afghanistan home by Christmas.”

Former national security adviser, H.R. McMaster was just as blunt regarding the actions of Mike Pompeo: “Our secretary of state signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban,” said McMaster. “This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves.”

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The day Biden arrived at the White House, there was no warm welcome the likes of which every other president in history has enjoyed. In fact, the door was locked. That’s how petty Trump is. That’s how mean-spirited and childish the man 74 million people voted for turned out to be.

Since Biden took office, he and his administration have been doing everything possible to manage the distribution of vaccines to millions of people; reboot an economy that lost 114 million jobs during 2020 alone and left millions more with a housing crisis; reform an immigration policy that allowed for the separation of families and sent thousands of children to homes with no documentation to tell us where they went; address the unrest raised by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a white cop; provide aid to states plagued by disastrous conditions resulting from man-made climate change—all of which were exacerbated by the former, twice impeached, disgraced president who did everything he could to gut the regulations that were designed to mitigate the problem.

Still, despite being responsible for everything just mentioned, Biden and his team have managed to fully vaccinate 163 million people. (And of those still unvaccinated, it is estimated that the bulk of them are refusing the vaccination based on misinformation spread by Trump and his followers.)

According to CNN Business, the economy is now operating at 93% of where it was pre-pandemic.

The Biden administration has also been working to reunite families separated at the border. Of approximately 5,500 children who are known to have been separated under the Trump administration, all but about 1,000 have since been reunited with their families. (Those who remain separated, are harder to reunite mainly because the parents were removed from the United States by the Trump administration.)

Billions have been sent to the states to protect people (who lost jobs due to Covid) from eviction. It is the states who dropped the ball on this one. No one should expect President Biden to create systems in 50 different states for distribution of that money. It is the role of the state governments to make that happen.

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We can’t deny the pain, frustration and sheer terror experienced by the people of Afghanistan who supported us during the 20-year war and who deserve to be protected. We can’t pretend hundreds of Afghans and dozens of American soldiers were not killed or wounded by a suicide bomb detonated during the evacuation.

But let us not forget either that the day after the suicide bomb that killed 13 American troops and over a hundred Afghan citizens, an Isis-K member responsible for orchestrating such attacks was found, targeted and killed. Biden was responsible for making that happen.

Since Biden became aware of the problems on the ground in Afghanistan, he has instructed his people to temporarily circumvent the visa process that had been preventing Afghan citizens from evacuating; he has increased the daily number of evacuees exponentially and at last count evacuation efforts by the U.S. and our allies have ensured that 117,000 people have been safely removed from Afghanistan.

When this process began a there were a lot of comparisons to the final chaotic days of the evacuation of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war. This is nonsensical. We don’t know how many people were evacuated from Saigon during that final push, but the only estimates I’ve found say it was about 7,000. 

There is a comparison to Vietnam that does makes sense, however; it is to compare them based on the stupidity and ego maniacal tendencies of the men who kept us in both wars for so long when all evidence suggested we could never win. In that regard, they are similar.

In terms of the ongoing evacuation efforts and the extraordinary coordination that has allowed so many to leave Afghanistan unharmed, there is no comparison.

Let’s also not forget that no country has ever managed a successful and trouble-free evacuation from any war. Not only has Biden done something with almost miraculous efficiency (once the situation left by Trump was fully examined, understood, and corrected) he did it without a template or a map to guide him. He and his team in the White House, along with leadership at the Pentagon, and our military personnel and allies, did this flying blind. And they still got 117,000 people to safety.

If Republicans impeach Biden, the full extent of Trump’s incompetence as well as his various attempts to sabotage the efforts of President Biden will be fully revealed to the world. Is that really what they want?

As for Biden, I guess you could say he’s incompetent. But I won’t.