Donny Trump Negotiated a Withdrawal Plans From Afghanistan

The Trump withdrawal plan that he approved with the Taliban called for a May 2021 withdrawal would’ve been a fuck-up if Trump had been president; instead President Joe Biden delayed the withdrawal until August 2021. The Afghan military folded like a stack of cards.

Donny Trump with Parents at Boarding High School

Donny Trump With His Parents Visit to Boarding School

Donald Trump: Military School Felt Like Serving in the Military

By Kathy Ehrich Dowd Published on September 9, 2015 05:00PM EDT

Donald Trump might not be an actual veteran, but the Republican presidential candidate claims he “always felt that I was in the military,” thanks to his time at a military-themed boarding school.

In an interview for the forthcoming biography Never Enough, the man who has upended the 2016 presidential race talked in typically blunt terms about how his high school years spent at New York Military Academy provided him with “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military,” according to quotes provided to The New York Times.

Trump, 69, entered the school located near West Point Military Academy in 1959 in the eighth grade at the insistence of his parents because of his poor behavior back home in Queens, and remained there through high school.

Later, the burgeoning real estate mogul received multiple deferments during the Vietnam War followed by a high draft number, and told biographer Michael Mr. D’Antonio that even though he never officially served, his training at the school was in keeping with the rigors of military life.

“My number was so incredible, and it was a very high draft number. Anyway, so I never had to do that, but I felt that I was in the military in the true sense because I dealt with those people,” he said per the Times, confirming he received a medical deferment for heel spurs.

Trump came under fire earlier this year for criticizing the military record of Sen. John McCain, a onetime Republican presidential nominee and decorated Vietnam War veteran who spent several years in captivity.

As his New York Military Academy mentor Theodore Dobias reportedly explained it, the businessman was “a conniver, even then.”

“[He] just wanted to be first in everything,” Dobias also said, per the newspaper. “And he wanted people to know he was first.”

His two ex-wives paint a similar picture in interviews for the biography. First ex-wife Ivanka Trump recounted an incident where her then-husband stomped off when she passed him on the ski slope in Aspen.

“He could not take it, that I could do something better than he did,” she said, per the Times.

Second ex-wife Marla Maples described him this way: “The little boy that still wants attention.”

Trump And The Military: The Legacy Of An Erratic Commander In Chief : NPR

But in the end, several analysts say, what stands out is the damage Trump did to civilian-military relations. He used troops — and senior officers — in clearly political events, at times referring to “my generals.” One senior officer, who is not authorized to speak publicly, recalled that in his dealings with Trump, the president was surprised to learn the military is apolitical.

Trump “was constantly undermining civilian-military relations around the bounds of what is acceptable behavior,” says Peter Feaver, a Duke University professor who focuses on those relations. “This, combined with the fact that he has a tin ear for all things in the civil-military domain, means that Trump did lots of damage to this crucial pillar of the republic.”

“Trump’s willingness to use the military against legitimate protests in America [last] year stands out as particularly significant and damaging,” says Carter Malkasian, a former senior Defense Department official. “The backlash was thankfully great, so hopefully our institutions have emerged undamaged.”

Michael O’Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, acknowledged he is no “Trump fan,” seeing him as “an extremely dangerous commander in chief” and citing his saber rattling and his threatening a war with North Korea.

One retired senior officer who served under three presidents and who asked not to be identified because he still works in government says in the end Trump was someone who in the national security realm was chaotic and transactional, often tweeting policy changes.

Such tweets announced that all troops would be withdrawn from Syria — a decision that angered both U.S. Special Forces on the ground and their Kurdish partners fighting the remnants of the Islamic State. In the end, Trump was convinced by military leaders to keep hundreds of troops to continue the fight — and protect oil fields.

“No one could trust that what he said was true — the old ‘your word is your bond’ didn’t hold true with the president,” the retired officer adds.

Trump’s constant policy by tweet and abrupt decisions, with little deliberation among officials and allies, left others to handle the fallout.

“Military and some civilian leaders have been in constant damage control over the last four years,” the retired officer says. “The old ‘cleanup on aisle 4, then 6, then 8.’ “

“Strategically, the military will remember him as a very political commander in chief who basically wanted to pull back from our overseas commitments and international alliances — an approach not well regarded by many in the force,” Stavridis says. “To the degree there was a ‘Trump Doctrine,’ it seemed to be withdraw and come home.”

Trump transition team compiling list of current and former U.S. military officers for possible courts-martial

Nov. 16, 2024, 8:52 PM EST / Updated Nov. 17, 2024, 6:55 AM EST.

  • Trump Transition Team’s Plan: They are compiling a list of military officers involved in the Afghanistan withdrawal to explore potential court-martial charges.
  • Investigation Focus: The review will look into the decision-making and execution of the withdrawal, possibly considering charges as serious as treason.
  • Controversy and Criticism: The withdrawal has been criticized as a “humiliation” and a “humiliating retreat,” with calls for accountability for the chaotic execution and resulting casualties.

The Trump transition team is compiling a list of senior current and former U.S. military officers who were directly involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan and exploring whether they could be court-martialed for their involvement, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the plan.

Officials working on the transition are considering creating a commission to investigate the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, including gathering information about who was directly involved in the decision-making for the military, how it was carried out and whether the military leaders could be eligible for charges as serious as treason, the two sources said.

“They’re taking it very seriously,” the person with knowledge of the plan said.

The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Matt Flynn, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for counternarcotics and global threats, is helping lead the effort, the sources said. It is being framed as a review of how the U.S. first got into the war in Afghanistan and how it ultimately withdrew.

“Matt Flynn has nothing to do with the Trump transition team, much less leading any review concerning military justice matters,” said Mark S. Zaid, Flynn’s attorney. Zaid said in a statement that “no one has sought out Mr. Flynn’s views on this hypothetical legal scenario.”

Multiple officials on the Trump transition team did not immediately respond to requests for comment about this article.

“The sources apparently pushing this story appear to be your typical selfish Washington, D.C., insiders seeking to gain better positioning for their own administration jobs,” said a person with knowledge of the campaign.

President-elect Donald Trump has condemned the withdrawal as a “humiliation” and “the most embarrassing day in the history of our country.”

It is not clear, though, what would legally justify “treason” charges, since the military officers were following the orders of President Joe Biden to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

A 2022 independent review by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction blamed both the Trump and Biden administrations for the chaotic U.S. withdrawal in 2021.

Trump first reached an agreement with the Taliban in 2020 to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan, roughly 13,000 troops, and release 5,000 Taliban fighters from prison. The Biden administration then completed the withdrawal and badly overestimated the ability of Afghan government forces to fight the Taliban on their own.

Trump’s choice for defense secretary, Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, has criticized the withdrawal, saying the U.S. lost the war and wasted billions of dollars.

In his book “The War on Warriors,” Hegseth wrote: “The next president of the United States needs to radically overhaul Pentagon senior leadership to make us ready to defend our nation and defeat our enemies. Lots of people need to be fired. The debacle in Afghanistan, of course, is the most glaring example.”

Hegseth calls the withdrawal a “humiliating retreat” and says leaders at the Defense Department were not held accountable for the deadly attack at Abbey Gate, which killed 13 U.S. service members and roughly 170 Afghan civilians. Nor were they held accountable for a subsequent U.S. airstrike in Kabul that officials thought would kill the Islamic State group leader behind the suicide attack but instead killed 10 innocent Afghans, including seven children, he wrote.

“These generals lied. They mismanaged. They violated their oath. They failed. They disgraced our troops, and our nation. They got people killed, unnecessarily,” he wrote. “And, to this moment, they keep their jobs. Worse, they continue to actively erode our military and its values — by capitulating to civilians with radical agendas. They are an embarrassment, with stars still on their shoulders.”

The transition team is looking at the possibility of recalling several commanders to active duty for possible charges, the U.S. official said.

It is not clear the Trump administration would pursue treason charges, and instead it could focus on lesser charges that highlight the officers’ involvement. “They want to set an example,” said the person with knowledge of the plan.

Speaking to NBC News days before the election, Howard Lutnick, one of the two advisers leading the transition, said that Trump learned after his first administration that he had hired Democratic generals and that he would not make that mistake again.

Former officials who worked in Trump’s first administration have said they advised Trump against policies they thought would weaken U.S. national security, such as withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria. And they advised against actions that they thought might violate the Constitution or inflame tensions domestically, such as deploying active-duty U.S. troops to quell protests after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.