The Biden administration has released a report blaming the 2021 Afghanistan disaster on its predecessor.
Well, sure. Trump, the great deal maker, had negotiated to give the Taliban the store, getting nothing in exchange. The pact required our withdrawal from Afghanistan, which President Biden proceeded to order.
But c’mon, man. Take responsibility for your own shit. We elected Biden to be different. Some disappointment there.
Like with refugees and immigrants. Despite a personal promise to me, to “immediately, immediately” reverse Trump’s policies, Biden’s actually are more similar than different. Because, it seems, he’s spooked by a Trumpist minority’s irrational fear of migrants. Likewise needlessly intimidated into continuing a misguided trade war with China and self-harming protectionist policies more broadly. Even continuing Trump’s preventing the World Trade Organization from functioning.
As for Afghanistan, Biden should have just repudiated Trump’s lousy deal. It would have been the right thing to do, instead of handing the country over to the Taliban. Biden miscalculated how fast that would happen. And we could have prevented it at very little cost, by maintaining a small presence there — avoiding what’s turned out to be human suffering on a colossal scale. And there’s no question that our rushed exit was botched, aggravating that suffering. Furthermore, those Afghan friends who did make it out, despite our misfeasance, are still being treated with callous irresponsibility.
That’s not on Trump. My heart sank when I heard about the report blaming him. What were they thinking? The catalog of Trump’s misdeeds is long enough. But this is a shameful dodging of responsibility. Indeed, very Trumpian.
So — is Biden just as bad?
I recall P.J. O’Rourke, the conservative gadfly, saying in 2016 that Hillary Clinton was wrong on everything — “but wrong within normal parameters.”
The same applies to Biden. He embodies many of the reasons why, for decades, I was a Republican, not a Democrat. But that was normal politics. To draw some equivalence between Biden and Trump is what philosophers call a category mistake. That’s what O’Rourke was getting at. Trump blows up the parameters of what used to be normal politics. And O’Rourke didn’t even live to see January 6, with an American president attempting a coup, based on lies, to overthrow an election and retain office illegitimately.
This should have made Americans’ heads explode, consigning Trump to permanent outer darkness of Benedict Arnoldhood. And the record has gotten even more damning since. There’s much hand-wringing over the merits of the NY indictment. But the bigger picture is that he’s so obviously something we should scrape off the bottom of our shoes. Yet too many voters are eager to re-elect him!
It’s only explainable as being not even “politics” any more. Not mere politics, but a religious fanaticism. Where no rationality comes in. No facts can penetrate; they’re all spun away as fitting somehow into the nutty narrative of an alternate reality.
So Trump will be the 2024 GOP presidential nominee. Enough Republicans have thrown themselves down this rabbit hole that no other outcome seems possible. The insane folly must play itself out to the bitter end.