Donald Trump is paying his respects to the American service members who were killed in the ISIS-K suicide bombing at Abbey Gate, on the third anniversary of the attack, with a visit to Arlington National Cemetery today.
Take out the all-caps, and his message this morning on President Biden’s disastrous withdrawal could have come from a conventional conservative hawk on Capitol Hill: Biden’s weakness in Afghanistan midwifed the current global crisis.
“You don’t take our soldiers out first, you take them out LAST, when all else is successfully done,” sounds like the sort of conditions-based withdrawal that many Republicans in Congress would have favored — the sort that Republican hawks who served in Trump’s administration say he would have implemented in a second term despite his talk about a full and immediate pullout.
Self-described foreign-policy “restrainers” have far less in common with the 45th president on foreign policy than they’d like you to believe.
Another example: The former president is a big Iran hawk, even though the people friendly to certain factions in Tehran — and who were critical of his decision to take out Qasem Soleimani and panned his strategy as “reckless”— are trying to appeal to him to strike a deal with the regime through some conservative media. Considering Iran’s ongoing plots to kill Trump and his top aides, and to undermine his reelection campaign, that persuasion campaign’s odds of success are low.