The Taliban waited until there was a weak figure in the White House to make its move and President Joe Biden acted now to pull U.S. troops from Afghanistan because he wanted credit for ending the 20-year war, Donald Trump Jr. said.
''Joe Biden is used to hiding in the basement,'' the eldest son of former President Donald Trump said Wednesday on Newsmax's ''Chris Salcedo Show.''
President Trump, he said, ''had a plan. They didn't want to pull out during the fighting season. Joe Biden wanted to wait because he wanted the photo op. It's like Kamala Harris at the border. … Joe Biden wanted credit for the withdrawal. I think we can all agree it's time to get out of Afghanistan. We probably should have done so before or at the time my friend [Robert] O'Neill killed Osama bin Laden. But we couldn't do that. But Joe Biden wanted it.
''So he changed Trump's plan. He tried to do it himself. He waited until the peak of the fighting season. He put no conditions on ... we had very clear conditions. So they came down these roads, we would have been droning them, we would have been taking them out.
''The other difference is, most importantly, everyone looks at Joe Biden and all they see is an old man on his last legs, a man that can't walk up a flight of stairs, an empty suit who can't complete a sentence,'' Donald Trump Jr. told Salcedo.
''There's a difference. When they look at Trump, they understand that he has resolve, that he means business, that he is not to be trifled with. So they didn't.''
By pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, the Biden administration created the largest hostage situation in the world, Trump Jr. said.
''This is literally a massive scale hostage situation,'' he said.
''We left a bunch of armaments … that are now in the hands of the Taliban. This is the same administration that doesn't want an American citizen to protect themselves with an AR-15. The level of incompetence knows no bounds.''
Biden defended his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from the country despite the Taliban's swift takeover, saying the U.S. mission was ''never supposed to be about nation-building.''
But, he said, the Taliban's rapid advance ''did unfold more quickly than we anticipated,'' he said.
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Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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