President Joe Biden’s low approval ratings and reelection numbers have long been the subject of commentaries and even jokes. But things weren’t always this way.
His administration lost the electorate’s confidence at a specific moment. It was August 2021, and it was because of his disastrous handling of U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
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Biden had gone on television earlier, on July 8, 2021, to boast that he had finally achieved the right conditions for withdrawal. He reassured the public that it would go smoothly. The Taliban would not rapidly overwhelm Afghan army forces and cause trouble for the retreating Americans.
“The drawdown is proceeding in a secure and orderly way, prioritizing the safety of our troops as they depart,” Biden said. “I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more competent in terms of conducting war. … The Taliban is not the North Vietnamese army. They’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy. It is not at all comparable.”
Weeks later, everything Biden had said was abruptly disproven as images of a chaotic, deadly, and disorderly retreat reached viewers in the U.S. In contrast to Biden’s reassurances that servicemembers were safe, 13 were killed in a terrorist attack that occurred only because of poor planning. The scenes were far worse than those of the rooftop in Vietnam — Afghans desperately grabbed onto fixed-wing aircraft and fell to their deaths as they tried to escape Taliban retribution.
Lo and behold, Biden’s earlier boasts about his good planning and smart decision-making suddenly gave way to bitter whining about how this was really the fault of the long-gone Trump administration.
As this happened, the White House was spinning furiously, making excuses, casting all the blame it could upon the former president, doing anything possible to avoid accountability for what was very clearly Biden’s own fault. When journalists brought up the administration’s disastrous failure to evacuate Americans and Afghans who would face Taliban retribution, Biden’s staff awkwardly changed the subject to talk about how incredible it was that they had moved a very large number of people (not checking who they were) out of the country in such a short space of time.
As for Biden himself, he resorted over and over again to the tired and contemptible line that the war in Afghanistan had to end at some point, as if a fiasco was inevitable. It was as if the Biden people were all living in a parallel universe. Because the electorate wasn’t living there with them, Biden’s numbers tanked overnight.
White House spin began during the withdrawal from Afghanistan never ended — it was just taken behind closed doors and distilled into a 12-page report. A new declassified summary attempts to explain away Biden’s fault. This attempt to revise history puts all the blame on Trump in defiance of what actually happened. The poverty of the Biden administration’s arguments for this historical revisionism is evident from the absurd explanations that his officials are being forced to try to give with a straight face.
National security council spokesman John Kirby summed it up unwittingly when he said, “This effort isn’t about accountability today.” No kidding. His performance in Thursday’s press briefing was something to behold. Pressed about billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment that the disorderly American retreat left behind for the Taliban’s use, he offered an utterly ridiculous account.
“It’s just like what we’re doing in Ukraine,” he said. “We give the Ukraine artillery ammunition, Stinger anti-air missiles, Javelin anti-tank. It’s their stuff at that point, not the Americans’. It’s their stuff. That stuff belonged to the Afghans. And so this idea, this argument is just ludicrous that we left millions of dollars of stuff in Afghanistan. We didn’t.”
He is saying the military didn’t really abandon tens of billions (not millions) of dollars worth of equipment to the Taliban, just left it with someone else, where the Taliban would immediately get it. (Kirby’s comments do not bode well for the military aid the U.S. is giving Ukraine.)
The one consistent thread in Biden’s leadership has been his refusal to accept responsibility for anything that has gone wrong during his presidency. Unless he is boasting of some success — as he did on July 8, 2021 —Biden likes to portray himself as a spectator of his administration rather than its leader.
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The blunder in Afghanistan was so big and so inexcusable that the electorate noticed and adjusted expectations of Biden sharply downward. The public rejected absurd explanations and tunes him out. He lied, and he got caught. That’s why his numbers have never recovered.
This belated attempt to rewrite history and erase Biden’s culpability is a disgrace. It insults the Afghan allies whom Biden left behind to suffer or die at the hands of the Taliban. It disregards the dozens of Americans who are still stuck in Afghanistan because of his incompetence.
