DETROIT — Former President Donald Trump told a National Guard Association conference Monday that he would can every senior military and diplomatic official involved in the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco — hours after paying tribute to 13 service members who died in an ISIS attack during the botched bugout.
“Caused by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world,” the 78-year-old told an audience that included part-time soldiers and their families in the Motor City after saying that voters “are going to fire Kamala and Joe on Nov. 5, we hope.”
“And when I take office we will ask for the resignations of every single official,” the Republican nominee added. “We’ll get the resignations of every single senior official who touched the Afghanistan calamity, to be on my desk at noon on Inauguration Day.
“You know, you have to fire people. You have to fire people when they do a bad job,” Trump added. “You got to fire them like on ‘The Apprentice’ … You did a lousy job. You did a terrible, terrible disservice to our country. You get fired when that happens.”
The service members and nearly 200 Afghans perished on Aug. 26, 2021 when ISIS-K suicide bomber Abdul Rahman al-Logari detonated an explosive vest outside Hamid Karzai International Airport’s Abbey Gate — the crowning catastrophe on a rushed evacuation that left hundreds of US citizens and Afghan allies behind to face a brutal Islamic fundamentalist regime.
No military or other government official is known to have lost their jobs over the disaster, even though a House Republican-led panel has heard testimony that President Biden ignored the advice of diplomats by insisting the pullout be completed ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attack.
In June of last year, a State Department report found officials were not prepared to process more than 125,000 evacuees at once because diplomatic personnel were directed to “continue embassy operations … in the belief that the security situation would not deteriorate substantially in Kabul for several months at the earliest.”
As it happened, the Taliban retook Afghanistan a little more than two weeks after the evacuation was announced.
“Nobody ever gets fired in this administration,” Trump complained. “It’s amazing all the bad things that have happened. Nobody ever gets fired. Problem is, when you fire somebody, they always end up writing a book about you. I’ve had more books written about me. I fire a lot of people when they don’t do a good job.”
Shortly before Trump spoke, a video message featuring his onetime rival Biden received tepid applause from conference attendees
“You all stepped up, you’re always there,” the 81-year-old president said in the video, name-checking his late son Beau, who served in the Delaware Army National Guard.
Trump insisted that he would have withdrawn from Afghanistan with “dignity and strength” and that the Abbey Gate attack was “the most embarrassing day in the history of our country.”
“We will never forget those brave warriors who made the supreme sacrifice for our country,” the former president said, adding that “we will honor their memory by restoring a government that puts the American people first.”
