Ex–Trump Adviser Drops Bombshell About Trump’s Taliban Deal

Donald Trump may have made the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan worse for President Biden.

General H.R. McMaster told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Monday night that Trump, while president, sought to negotiate with the Taliban as U.S. troops began leaving Afghanistan, which undermined the Afghan government. As a result, the U.S. government forced the Afghan government to release 5,000 members of the Taliban.

The former national security adviser was on CNN to discuss his new book, At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. The revelation puts the chaos of the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan into greater context, as conservatives sought to lay much of the blame onto Biden and successfully pushed that narrative into media coverage.

It’s the latest damaging revelation from McMaster’s book. Last week, an early excerpt from the book detailed how Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin was able to manipulate Trump by playing on his “ego and insecurities.” On Monday, another newly revealed excerpt described meetings in the Oval Office as “exercises in competitive sycophancy” where Trump made particularly “outlandish” suggestions, including one instance in which he asked, “Why don’t we just bomb the drugs?” in regards to narcotics in Mexico.

McMaster is one of many of Trump’s former national security officials to criticize the now convicted felon for his conduct as president. One of his other former national security advisers, John Bolton, said earlier this month that Trump “can’t tell the difference between what’s true and what’s false.”

Former White House chief of staff John Kelly has described the former president as “a person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about.… A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law. There is nothing more that can be said.”

“God help us.”

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.”

The classified documents case against Donald Trump is not dead yet, as special counsel Jack Smith is asking a federal appeals court to reinstate it. 

In July, Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the 42 felony charges against the former president and convicted felon, ruling that Smith’s appointment to the case was unconstitutional. On Monday, Smith appealed to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the dismissal is “at odds with widespread and longstanding appointment practices in the Department of Justice and across the government.” 

Trump allegedly broke the law by retaining classified documents from his presidency at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and then refusing to return them to the federal government. Cannon was criticized for her handling of the classified documents case, bogging down proceedings by entertaining questionable motions from Trump’s defense and seemingly favoring the Republican presidential nominee. Her experience was called into question by legal experts including one of Trump’s former lawyers, Ty Cobb. A ruling in Smith’s favor could result in a new judge taking over the case, though notably Smith did not ask for Cannon’s removal in his brief to the 11th circuit.

Cannon’s dismissal came after the Supreme Court ruled that American presidents have immunity for their “official acts” while in office, throwing the case’s future into doubt. And even if the appeals court overturns Cannon’s ruling, there is no timeframe on when a new trial would take place, meaning that it would almost certainly come several months after the November elections. This raises the possibility that Trump could return to the White House with the case underway, and then would simply ask his new attorney general to drop the charges.  

Trump still faces federal charges for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election in connection with the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The Supreme Court’s ruling has also put that case in limbo, with a hearing to determine the next steps postponed until September. The former president also faces criminal charges in Georgia for attempting to overturn the state’s presidential election results, but that case is stalled over attempts by Trump’s legal team to have its prosecutor, Fani Willis, thrown off of the case.  

Right now, the only criminal case against Trump to proceed to a trial verdict is his hush-money case in New York, where the Republican presidential nominee was convicted on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. If Smith has his way, Trump may one day face a criminal trial again.  

Hundreds of staffers that served under President George W. Bush, Arizona Senator John McCain, and Utah Senator Mitt Romney jointly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday, writing that another presidency under Donald Trump would be “untenable.”

“Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected,” the group wrote in a letter. “The alternative, however, is simply untenable. At home, another four years of Donald Trump’s chaotic leadership, this time focused on advancing the dangerous goals of Project 2025, will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions.”

“Abroad, democratic movements will be irreparably jeopardized as Trump and his acolyte JD Vance kowtow to dictators like Vladimir Putin while turning their backs on our allies,” the letter continued. “We can’t let that happen.”

The letter received 238 signatures in all—significantly more than endorsed the 2020 edition of this letter, in which 150 former Republican staffers announced their intention to vote for President Joe Biden.

Some of the signees include former McCain chiefs of staff Mark Salter and Chris Koch, former McCain legislative director Joe Donoghue, McCain’s 2008 press secretary Jennifer Lux, and George H.W. Bush chief of staff Jean Becker.

The endorsement underscores how divided traditional Republicans feel from other conservatives as Trump, Project 2025, and increasingly extreme factions of the right tighten their grip on the future of the party. Some of that tension has actually been stoked by Trump himself: While running for president in 2015, Trump—who famously avoided the Vietnam War draft with a timely diagnosis of bone spurs—mocked McCain for being taken prisoner while serving in Vietnam, declaring that the 2008 Republican presidential nominee was “not a war hero” and that he “like[s] people that weren’t captured.”

But Trump’s anti-military rhetoric isn’t just in the past. Instead, it’s been a point of contention for the MAGA candidate even in recent weeks. Earlier this month, Trump came under fire for arguing that the Presidential Medal of Freedom he awarded to one of his billionaire donors was “much better” than the nation’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor. That comment rubbed veterans the wrong way, who connected Trump’s disrespectful rhetoric to a 2020 Atlantic report that caught the former president repeatedly referring to fallen soldiers as “suckers and losers.”

Donald Trump, unsurprisingly, thinks Robert F. Kennedy’s endorsement of him is a “big” deal.

“He’s a great guy, respected by everybody,” a low-energy Trump said on Friday after Kennedy announced he was suspending his campaign.

Fact check: RFK Jr. is not respected by everybody. Even his own extended family regularly pillories him in the press.

Over the weekend, Trump reposted pro-Kennedy messages on Truth Social, including one referring to Kennedy and Trump as an “anti-establishment ticket.” Maybe J.D. Vance really is in danger of losing his job.

It’s been quite the journey for Kennedy. He entered the 2024 race as a Democrat, switched to independent, and then allegedly begged Kamala Harris for a spot in her administration. Her campaign ignored him.

But Trump, desperate for any kind of advantage against Harris, has welcomed Kennedy with open arms. This, despite the fact that Kennedy allegedly said earlier this summer that Trump was “a terrible human being. The worse [sic] president ever and barely human. He is probably a sociopath.”

On Sunday, Kennedy claimed that he will pave the way for more Democrats to jump ship to the Republicans, saying in a Fox News interview that the Trump campaign will soon make a “series of announcements about other Democrats who are joining his 2024 campaign.”