\u201cWe didn\u2019t lose one person in 18 months. And then they took over that disaster.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2014 Former president Donald Trump, in a video of him at Arlington National Cemetery speaking to the families of U.S. troops killed at Abbey Gate in Afghanistan, posted on TikTok, Aug. 28<\/p>\n
This TikTok of Trump\u2019s controversial visit to Arlington, where he marked the third anniversary of a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops during the chaotic evacuation of Afghanistan overseen by President Joe Biden, has been viewed more than 11 million times. Federal law prohibits election-related activities at military cemeteries, but Trump\u2019s entourage pushed past a cemetery employee who tried to prevent Trump\u2019s aides from bringing cameras, according to the Army.<\/p>\n
Those cameras appear to have recorded Trump saying these words to the Gold Star families. (The TikTok shows him talking to families as the words are spoken as a voice-over.) In his phrasing, it sounds as if no troops were killed in Afghanistan during the last 18 months of his presidency. That\u2019s false, though as we will show, there was an 18-month gap with no fatalities across Trump\u2019s and Biden\u2019s combined presidencies.<\/p>\n
A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to queries about why Trump says there were no fatalities over 18 months. Using the Defense Casualty Analysis System, we first reviewed every 18-month period in Trump\u2019s four years as president, looking only at deaths in hostile action in Afghanistan during Operation Freedom\u2019s Sentinel, not accidental deaths such as a in a vehicle or helicopter crash. There was no such period.<\/p>\n
Then we focused on the last 18 months of his presidency \u2014 July 20, 2019, to Jan. 20, 2021. That makes the most sense since Trump referenced Biden\u2019s taking over. The Defense Department database showed 12 deaths from hostile action in that period. We double-checked with the news releases issued by the Pentagon in that period and confirmed the 12 names.<\/p>\n
The last two deaths occurred on Feb. 8, 2020. Javier Jaguar Gutierrez of San Antonio and Antonio Rey Rodriguez of Las Cruces, New Mexico, both 28, were fatally ambushed by a rogue Afghan policeman. Trump, along with Vice President Mike Pence, flew to Dover Air Force Base when the bodies arrived in the United States.<\/p>\n
That was 11 months before Trump\u2019s presidency ended. The suicide bombing at Kabul\u2019s airport that killed the 13 troops took place on Aug. 26, 2021 \u2014 seven months into Biden\u2019s presidency. The last 11 months of Trump\u2019s presidency and the first seven of Biden\u2019s add up to 18 months.<\/p>\n
In March 2020, Trump approved an agreement with the Taliban (not the Afghan government at the time) for all U.S. forces to leave the country by May 1, 2021. He sealed the deal with a phone conversation with Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban and head of its political office in Qatar. \u201cWe had a good long conversation today and, you know, they want to cease the violence,\u201d Trump told reporters at the time. \u201cThey\u2019d like to cease violence also.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite abandoning many of Trump\u2019s policies, Biden honored this one, just stretching out the departure by a few months in 2021.<\/p>\n
Trump even celebrated Biden\u2019s decision to stick with the withdrawal. \u201cGetting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do. I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible,\u201d he said in a written statement after Biden announced he would continue the departure set in motion by Trump.<\/p>\n
At a political rally on June 26 that year, weeks before the collapse of the Afghan government, Trump bragged that he had made it difficult for Biden to change course. \u201cI started the process. All the troops are coming back home. They couldn\u2019t stop the process,\u201d he said. \u201cTwenty-one years is enough, don\u2019t we think? Twenty-one years. They [the Biden administration] couldn\u2019t stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process.\u201d<\/p>\n
In about a half-dozen campaign rallies and media events last month, Trump mentioned his conversation with the Taliban leader and tied it to the 18-month period without deaths in hostile action. But often Trump left the impression \u2014 as in the TikTok with the Gold Star families \u2014 that this only happened on his watch. Here are some examples:<\/p>\n
\u201cAbdul was not playing games with me. You know, they were executing a lot of our soldiers. And I spoke to him, I said, \u2018Abdul, don\u2019t do it anymore. There\u2019ll be no more.\u2019 Anyway, I said it pretty tough. And you know what? For 18 months, we didn\u2019t have one American soldier killed in Afghanistan. And then I left, and then I left, and there\u2019s a bunch of incompetent people took over, and it all started up again.\u201d (Rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Aug. 17.)<\/span> But on occasion, Trump gets it close to correct, such as in these remarks during a news conference in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 8: \u201cYou know, if you go back and check your records, for 18 months, I had a talk with Abdul. Abdul was the leader of the Taliban, still is. But I had a strong talk with him. For 18 months, not one American soldier was shot at or killed, not even shot at, 18 months.\u201d<\/p>\n The Defense Department determined that the suicide bomber, Abdul Rahman al-Logari, was not a member of the Taliban but part of the Islamic State-Khorasan, a regional branch of the Islamic State terrorist group. He was one of several thousand ISIS-K members released by the Taliban in mid-August 2021 and one of several possible suicide bombers the group had available for the attack, according to a review of the investigation completed in April.<\/p>\n Trump has a basis for citing 18 months without a death from hostile action in Afghanistan. The period of relative quiet began with his deal with the Taliban. A case could be made that the seeds of the collapse of the Afghan government \u2014 and the chaotic withdrawal of Americans that accompanied it \u2014 stemmed from the same deal.<\/p>\n But Trump errs in suggesting \u2014 as in the TikTok with the Gold Star families gathered in Arlington \u2014 that those 18 months took place entirely during his presidency. He earns Two Pinocchios.<\/p>\n (About our rating scale)<\/p>\n Send us facts to check by filling out this form<\/p>\n Sign up for The Fact Checker weekly newsletter<\/p>\n The Fact Checker is a verified signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network code of principles<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t lose one person in 18 months. And then they took over that disaster.\u201d \u2014 Former president Donald Trump, in a video of him at Arlington National Cemetery speaking to the families of U.S. troops killed at Abbey Gate in Afghanistan, posted on TikTok, Aug. 28 This TikTok of Trump\u2019s controversial visit to Arlington, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":8978,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u201cWe had no soldiers killed for 18 months while I was there because they knew \u2014 don\u2019t play around with our soldiers.\u201d (Rally in Asheboro, N.C., Aug. 21.)<\/span>
\n\u201cI dealt with Abdul, and he\u2019s still the leader, strong man, smart man, but he understood that if he did anything because we were losing a lot of people to the snipers. \u2026 And he understood. And he said, \u2018Yes, Your Excellency, I understand.\u2019 He called me Your Excellency. I wonder if he calls that to Biden. I doubt it, right? But he understood that and he respected us. And for 18 months, not one American soldier was killed, not one.\u201d (Remarks at a news conference in Bedminster, N.J., Aug. 15.)<\/span><\/p>\nThe Pinocchio Test<\/h3>\n
Two Pinocchios<\/h3>\n