The Daily Fuckup

Donald Trump spent much of his presidency selling himself as the man who could force outcomes that other politicians only talked about. Afghanistan was one of his favorite examples. He wanted the public to believe he had the discipline to cut through an unwinnable war, bring troops home, and declare victory over the kind of open-ended conflict Washington had long struggled to manage. But by late August 2021, as the U.S. withdrawal unraveled in public view and Kabul fell with stunning speed, that boast kept boomeranging back onto him. The political record pointed straight to the agreement his administration signed with the Taliban in February 2020, a deal that reduced U.S. troop levels, established a timetable for withdrawal, and effectively signaled that the Americans were on the way out. That message mattered. It gave the insurgents reason to wait, and it left the Afghan government with less leverage at the moment it most needed it. As the evacuation became one of the most humiliating exits in modern U.S. military history, Trump’s claim that he had set the stage for ending the war sounded less like mastery and more like a handoff that had already started to fail before he left office.

The argument over responsibility was never going to be simple, and by Aug. 29 it had hardened into a political fight over chronology, causation, and blame. Trump’s defenders had a straightforward line: Joe Biden was in office when the withdrawal collapsed, Biden was the one overseeing the evacuation, and Biden still had the power to change course if he wanted to. That is true as far as it goes. A president in office owns the decisions made under his watch, and Biden plainly bore responsibility for the way the withdrawal was executed and explained. But the larger story could not be reduced to the final chaotic weeks of August. The Trump administration had already accepted a withdrawal framework that was hard to reconcile with conditions on the ground. It had already weakened the Afghan government’s bargaining position by making U.S. departure look inevitable. It had already set in motion a sequence in which the Taliban could simply outlast the Americans instead of making real concessions. By the time Biden inherited the war, the United States was not starting from a clean slate. It was operating inside a structure Trump had helped build, and that structure carried its own political and military consequences. Trump and his allies could rage against the results, but they could not honestly pretend the agreement itself had not shaped them.

That is what made the story so stubborn for Trump personally. He had spent years trying to present himself as a president who understood leverage in a way his predecessors supposedly did not. He wanted the record to show that he was tougher, more realistic, and less sentimental about America’s role abroad. Afghanistan was supposed to validate that image. Instead, the deal his team negotiated exposed the downside of his approach: a rushed bargain can look like strength in the moment and still hollow out the leverage needed to manage the exit later. A withdrawal timetable can be used as pressure only if it is matched by some broader strategy that preserves bargaining power. In this case, the combination of troop reductions, deadlines, and public expectations made the American departure easier to anticipate and harder to manage. It gave the Taliban room to wait and gave the Afghan state less confidence that Washington would back it indefinitely. Even people who believed the war should end were not required to pretend this was a careful transition. They could support leaving and still recognize that the terms of leaving made a bad outcome more likely. That distinction mattered politically because Trump was trying to convert the final collapse into proof that his own approach had been right all along. The paper trail suggested something messier: his bargain may have created the very conditions that made the disaster easier to exploit.

The fallout on Aug. 29 showed how hard it had become to separate Trump’s deal from the collapse that followed. Democrats kept returning to the Doha agreement and the May 1 deadline as evidence that the former president had planted the seeds of the crisis before handing the problem to Biden. Foreign-policy hawks and other critics made a related point from another angle, arguing that the drawdown and timetable stripped away leverage the United States still needed if it wanted to influence events in Afghanistan. Even people who had long wanted the U.S. out of the conflict were not eager to claim that the Trump administration had engineered a stable path to peace. The opposite was more plausible: it had helped normalize the idea of exit without solving the basic question of what would hold after the Americans left. That did not absolve Biden of his own choices, including the speed of the evacuation and the confidence with which his administration had described the likely outcome. But it did complicate Trump’s effort to pose as the wronged adult in the room. If your strongest defense is that the next president inherited a mess you helped make, you are not really demonstrating statesmanship. You are admitting that your signature foreign-policy achievement came with a built-in trap door. And once that trap door opened, the blast radius was never going to stop at your successor’s feet. It was always going to reach back to the man who helped set the terms in the first place.