Much of what the press said about Trump now applies to Biden

The media have told us that President Trump is callous, ill-informed, indifferent to the facts, unwilling to listen to the experts, ready to inflict untold damage to our interests – leaving allies abandoned, enemies emboldened and America with its reputation in tatters.

But now, in a tragic turn of events, much of what the press has said about Donald Trump applies to Joe Biden.

The Biden disaster in Afghanistan – which claimed the lives of 13 U.S. servicemen and dozens of civilians – highlights this dynamic. In announcing in April that the United States would leave Afghanistan, the president did not learn the real terms of the deal negotiated between Trump and the Taliban. Whatever its shortcomings, the so-called Doha deal regulated the Taliban’s military actions, while requiring good faith negotiations between them and the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani. Since the Taliban was in breach of Doha and the required negotiations failed, the United States was entitled to leave the pact. He certainly couldn’t be held to a specific evacuation deadline.

Biden, ignoring all these political “details” – as Trump was once said to do – simply decreed that the United States would leave Afghanistan before the 9/11 anniversary, without strings attached. He thus placed the lens on substance, politicizing what is sacred in the process – as Trump was also once said to be doing. (At the same time, by changing the cutoff date for Trump’s May 1 date not once but twice, to September 11 and then to August 31, Biden clearly found flexibility in Doha where he wanted it.)

Even as U.S. intelligence warned of the Taliban’s advance and the estimated timeline for their victory drastically curtailed, Biden and his administration continued to spin. Another way to put it: they despised the experts, choosing instead to live inside a bubble of “alternative facts”.

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby spoke of “very capable” and “very sophisticated” Afghan military units, while White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Afghan forces “have this that they need ”. In a phone call with Ghani, Biden went even further, pressuring the Afghan leader to say the military conditions were positive “whether it was true or not.” One has to ask: while building a false confidence in the Afghan army – the better to blame it later – has Biden ever considered the consequences of giving American citizens in Afghanistan, or our Afghan allies, a false confidence in their continued security?

Biden’s response to the Taliban victory and the collapse of the Afghan government is in keeping with the media’s caricature of Trump of an indifferent leader acting unilaterally in the world.

As chaos ensued in Afghanistan, with trapped American citizens, betrayed Afghan allies, and scenes at Kabul airport reminiscent of Saigon in 1975, Biden mustered little empathy to accompany all his finger points. and his ignorance of the facts. The president complained about Trump’s Doha deal, which he “inherited,” as if it gave him no opportunity to pivot. He conveniently mocked the Afghan army’s “will to fight”. He claimed, fantastically, “to have seen no question of our credibility on the part of our allies in the world”.

Biden may have missed the speech by Tom Tugendhat, a veteran of the fighting in Afghanistan and chairman of the UK’s parliamentary committee on foreign affairs. Tugendhat expressed his “grief and rage – the feeling [of] abandonment not only of a country, but of the sacrifice my friends have made. Or maybe the president was unaware of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s statement lamenting the Taliban’s “bitter, dramatic and terrible” conquest of Afghanistan.

As the disaster in Afghanistan shows, what the mainstream media said about Trump is true about Biden. And the consequences are only starting to be felt.

Augustus Howard is a national and foreign policy columnist.