President Joe Biden's administration began carrying out a long-awaited withdrawal of American troops in Afghanistan after 20 years of war in the region stole hundreds of thousands of lives and cost nearly $1 trillion.
But the Taliban's fundamentalist regime soon retook the country at a dizzying pace unanticipated by administration officials, leading to chaos that endangered both Americans on the ground and Afghans who worked with them as allies of the United States. After the Taliban overtook the presidential palace in Kabul, the cities airport was flooded with thousands of residents desperately trying to escape.
The botched withdrawal is the Biden administration's biggest foreign policy disaster yet, but amid two decades' of futile war, no American President in recent history is blameless.
This is especially true for former President Donald Trump, whose administration extended unprecedented goodwill toward the Taliban to the point of openly negotiating with the group, securing the release of thousands of Taliban prisoners, and even inviting its leaders to Camp David on the week of September 11.
As the Biden administration faces intense scrutiny for the messiness of the withdrawal, Republican entities and elected officials have leapt to criticize the administration.
But the party's prior praise of Trump's withdrawal plan to remove American troops from the region by May disappeared from its website, as pointed out by the Washington Post's Dave Weigel.
According to Yahoo! News, this was on the GOP's webpage earlier this month.
It said:
"PRESIDENT TRUMP HAS CONTINUED TO TAKE THE LEAD IN PEACE TALKS AS HE SIGNED A HISTORIC PEACE AGREEMENT WITH THE TALIBAN IN AFGHANISTAN, WHICH WOULD END AMERICA'S LONGEST WAR."
Now, the page is nowhere to be found.
Deputy chief of staff for the Republican National Committee, Mike Reed, pushed back, calling Weigel's suggestion "dishonest."
Weigel later clarified the intent of his tweet.
According to Business Insider, the page was removed on August 15, as Kabul fell, so people were skeptical at Reed's claims, even though no posts from 2020 remain on the RNC's site.
But the RNC site is far from the only instance the party's figureheads expressed support for a swift withdrawal. As recently as June, Trump was crediting himself with the end to America's longest war.
People aren't forgetting.
The Biden administration now faces calls to ensure the rescue of as many Afghan refugees as possible.
