Donald Trump hasn’t been president for eight months now, but some Leftists had become so used to marinating in their Trump-hate over the last four years that they just can’t let the Bad Orange Man go. Over the last few days, “comedian” Bill Maher and “intellectual” Sam Harris have both gone out of their way to claim that the mess Old Joe Biden and his handlers have made of Afghanistan is positively Trumpian in the sheer grandeur of the catastrophe. If any sane people are left around Maher and Harris, they might take them aside and quietly remind them that Trump never presided over anything remotely resembling the disaster in Afghanistan, but then again, if these high-profile Leftists were interested in rational argumentation, they wouldn’t be Leftists in the first place.
Maher said Friday of Afghanistan: “This country crashed faster than a condominium in Miami.” But he felt more sorrow than anger toward the man responsible, saying, “I feel bad for Biden.” He did his best to make it all Trump’s fault, or at least Trump-like: “The adults are back in charge, the people who know what they’re doing, the Democrats, and the pullout looks — I can’t think of how it could’ve been any different if it was Trump. I mean, how could it be more f—ed up? How could it be more incompetent? How could it be more Trumpian? So what do I say to myself to get to sleep at night when the adults are back in charge and they f— it up exactly as bad as Trump would?”
Maher may have gotten this idea from Harris, who tweeted Wednesday: “Biden achieves near-Trumpian negligence here. But unlike Trump, whose reputation among his fans was magically shielded from earthly damage, Biden can’t get away with being a callous moron in an emergency—and he shouldn’t. This is all just sickening.”
Related: Cutting to the Chase: Why Trump Was Driven from Office
But seriously, what exactly did Trump handle as incompetently as Biden’s handlers have handled Afghanistan? Certainly not Afghanistan itself, where Trump wanted to withdraw but has stated since this debacle began that he would have done so much more carefully, and with conditions given to the Taliban to ensure a safe and orderly departure for the Americans. No doubt Maher and Harris and their ilk don’t believe that he would have carried off the withdrawal with that much competence and aplomb, but we’ll never know that. So what examples can they give us of staggering incompetence during the Trump administration, as an indication of how badly the America-First president might have mishandled the departure from Afghanistan?
There just aren’t any. When Trump left office, America was energy independent. It isn’t anymore. At Trump’s urging, Covid vaccines were developed in record time (and Trump wasn’t saying anything about forcing people to get them, or penalizing those who refused). His administration aided in the conclusion of unprecedented, historic peace accords between Israel and several of its Muslim Arab neighbors that had up to that point been unremittingly hostile. The economy boomed, cratered over Covid, and began to boom again. The border was under control.
Trump accomplished all this and a great deal more amid an atmosphere of relentless hostility from the political and media establishment, which tried to frame him for colluding with Russia, and when that failed, impeached him for an ordinary phone call with another head of state. The reality is that Maher, Harris, and others like them told us for four years that Trump was an incompetent fool, far out of his depth, blundering and blustering his way through the presidency, but Trump’s actual record is studded with many more positive accomplishments than the records of any other recent president. Trump’s original and ultimately fatal flaw was that he was not part of the establishment, and refused to play the game the way the establishment demanded. And so he had to be toppled, by any means possible.
And the propaganda continues. Maher and Harris say that Biden’s behavior of late is “Trumpian” because they’re hoping to bamboozle as many Americans as possible to associate Trump, for all his genuine achievements, with fumbling, failure, and incompetence. They’re secure in the knowledge that the media has for well over four years now told us every day how stupid and evil Trump is, and never discussed the real achievements of his administration, with the result that many Americans really don’t know the facts, and swallow the propaganda.
The Big Lie can only be put over by dint of constant repetition. So expect many more Leftist pundits over the next few days to say Biden’s Afghanistan failure was “Trumpian.”
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