Donald Trump gave another low-energy speech Monday during an appearance at the National Guard Association of the United States General Conference in Detroit.
Trump’s sleepy, staggered reading from his teleprompter focused largely on criticisms of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, and Kamala Harris who Trump has knocked as being the “last person in the room” with Biden before the decision was made. Trump, who reportedly viewed Afghanistan as a lost cause during his time in office, has repeatedly blamed Biden for abandoning $85 billion worth of equipment in Afghanistan, although it was more like $7 billion .
Trump has also blamed Biden’s accelerated withdrawal timeline for the deaths of 13 U.S. service members, who were killed in a terrorist attack at the Hamid Karzai International Airport that also killed 170 Afghans. The Republican nominee appeared at a memorial honoring the three-year anniversary of the attack on Monday morning, but by the afternoon, he seemed confused by the event.
“And the fake news doesn’t want to talk about it.” Trump complained on stage. “They don’t even talk about the three-year anniversary—a terrible word to use, but that’s what they’re calling it, an ‘anniversary.’ I think of ‘anniversary’ as a little bit different, but it’s three years now,” Trump said. Of course, “anniversary” simply refers to the date that an event took place in a previous year—its alternative meaning to Trump is yet unclear.
On stage, Trump promised he would ask for the resignations of “every single senior official who touched the Afghanistan calamity to be on his desk at noon on Inauguration Day.”
“You have to fire people when they do a bad job. We never fire anybody. You gotta fire ‘em, like on The Apprentice !” Trump said. As Trump reminisced about his old NBC show—from which he was fired in 2015 for making derogatory comments about immigrants—he seemed momentarily excited.
“You’re fired! You did a lousy job,” he said, imagining his first day in the White House, as the audience applauded. His acting out did little to invigorate him, though, as he proceeded on a monotonous speech.
Trump complained about “losers” he’d fired writing books about him, possibly a reference to Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster’s blistering account of Trump’s White House, which is set to be released Tuesday.
Trump told a winding story about traveling to Iraq to see about dealing with ISIS without rest, “unlike other people that we know,” he joked, a strange shot at Biden, who is no longer running for president.
“He’d rest and then leave—there’d be no meeting!” Trump quipped all the same.
Trump continued to insist that Afghanistan was selling the $7 $85 billion in equipment the U.S. had “stupidly left them,” complaining that Washington had left night vision goggles behind. “How stupid these people were,” Trump said.
Under Trump’s administration, “we were getting out, but we were getting out with strength, and dig-ny,” the former president boasted , slurring slightly.
Trump continued to falsely claim that the sheer fact of his presidency had kept U.S. military members safe. “We didn’t have one soldier killed—even shot at in 18 months. And then these guys took over, and uh, big lack of respect. But they had a lot of respect for us during that period,” Trump said, calling himself “the first president in decades who started no new wars.”
Trump’s claim that no soldiers were killed for 18 months in Afghanistan is blatantly untrue, according to Reuters . During Trump’s presidency, there were 45 hostile deaths and 63 total deaths, with no 18-month gap in casualties, including when Trump was negotiating an Afghanistan withdrawal, according to the Defense Casualty Analysis System for Operation Freedom’s Sentinel database.
Trump went on to brag that he was “very good at using a telephone,” and whine about Ukraine’s “surge” into Russia, which he claimed would result in World War III.
He continued to criticize U.S. support of Ukraine against Russia, claiming that as a result of the U.S.’s tremendous support, its own military was running out of ammunition . It was a haphazard reference to a high-profile report on U.S. national defense that claimed the U.S. would likely run out of munitions within “three to four weeks” in the event of a war with China.
“That’s a lousy thing,” Trump said, claiming that if he were president, he would not have released such a report. “You don’t do reports that say we’re going to lose to China in a war, stupid people do that.”
“These people are just so destructive,” Trump said of U.S. officials responsible for the supposed munitions blight . “So—you know I always look for good words. Highly sophisticated, [I’m] highly educated. I like sophisticated words, but there’s only one word I can—stupid, they’re stupid people.”
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