The Daily Fuckup

By late September 2021, Donald Trump had found one of his most effective political weapons against President Joe Biden: Afghanistan. The images coming out of Kabul after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal were still seared into the public mind, and the collapse of the Afghan government gave Trump and his allies a ready-made narrative of incompetence, humiliation and lost control. They could point to the airport crush, the desperate evacuation scenes and the broader sense that the United States had ended a 20-year war in a way that looked improvised and reckless. For a political operation built around instinctive combat and grievance, it was a gift. Yet the attack came with an obvious flaw that Trump could not fully escape. The withdrawal was not simply Biden’s project gone wrong; it was the culmination of a process Trump’s own administration had negotiated and set in motion before he left office.

That history gave the criticism a sharp but unstable edge. Trump had signed off on a framework with the Taliban that committed the United States to leaving Afghanistan under certain conditions and on a timetable that narrowed the choices available to the next president. Once that deal existed, Biden was forced to decide whether to keep the U.S. on course, reopen a conflict that had already dragged on for years, or attempt to reshape the exit under intense political and military pressure. Biden chose to move ahead with the withdrawal, and what followed was one of the most damaging moments of his presidency. But the basic architecture of the exit plan was not invented in 2021. The former president could rightly argue that Biden was responsible for the execution, yet that argument did not erase Trump’s role in designing the policy trap. His attacks therefore carried a built-in contradiction: he was condemning the outcome of a process his team had helped authorize.

That contradiction did not make the criticism politically useless. If anything, it made it easier for Trump to exploit the emotional power of the moment while avoiding the harder issue of responsibility. Afghanistan offered exactly the kind of tableau his political operation tends to favor: a visible failure, a foreign policy disaster and an electorate looking for someone to blame. The more chaotic the withdrawal appeared, the more natural it became for Trump to present himself as the tougher, more competent alternative, even though his own presidency had left Biden with limited room to maneuver. That distinction was easy to blur in political messaging. It was much harder to blur in a serious accounting of what happened. Trump could use the images from Kabul to argue that Biden was weak or inept, but that line of attack only worked if listeners overlooked the fact that the framework behind the withdrawal was negotiated on Trump’s watch. The former president was not an outsider looking in at a disaster created by someone else. He was part of the chain of events that led there.

That is why the Afghanistan fight revealed so much about the way political blame works in Washington. Leaders routinely try to inherit the credit and pass along the wreckage. Trump’s camp wanted the public to remember only the collapse, not the deal that helped shape the exit. Biden’s defenders countered that he inherited a bad arrangement and then made damaging choices in how he carried it out. Both claims contain some truth, and the tension between them is the reason the argument never settled cleanly. Trump was correct that Biden owned the final decision and the consequences of the withdrawal’s execution. He was also vulnerable to the charge that he had helped create the conditions that made the outcome so difficult to manage. The result was a messy overlap of responsibility, in which the politics favored simple blame but the facts resisted it. The former president could score points by speaking as though the story began the day Biden took office, but the historical record made that posture look selective at best. In a situation like that, the attack may land emotionally, but it does not fully hold up under scrutiny.

The broader lesson is that Afghanistan became less a test of foreign policy competence than a test of political memory. Trump understood that the public tends to respond strongly to visible failure and that many voters would not trace the withdrawal all the way back to the negotiations his administration conducted. That made the issue especially attractive to him as a former president eager to stay central in Republican politics and to weaken Biden’s standing. But it also exposed a familiar Trump pattern: celebrating toughness while distancing himself from the consequences of his own decisions. The politics of the moment allowed him to frame Biden as the owner of the disaster, at least in the short term. The accountability math was less forgiving. The withdrawal framework was part of Trump’s legacy, and that legacy did not disappear simply because the chaos broke on Biden’s watch. The result was a classic case of own-the-mess politics, in which the most potent critic is also one of the people most responsible for the mess in the first place.