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All the Times Donald Trump Said the U.S. Should Get Out of Afghanistan

Trump is expected to announce Monday night that he's sending several thousand more U.S. troops to fight in the 16-year war.

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President Donald Trump waves after getting off Air Force One at Hagerstown Regional Airport in Hagerstown, Md., Aug. 18, 2017, en route to nearby Camp David, for a meeting with his national security team to discuss strategy for South Asia, including India, Pakistan and the way forward in Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
President Donald Trump waves after getting off Air Force One at Hagerstown Regional Airport in Hagerstown, Md., Aug. 18, 2017, en route to nearby Camp David, for a meeting with his national security team to discuss strategy for South Asia, including India, Pakistan and the way forward in Afghanistan. Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

For years as a reality TV star, Donald Trump demanded that the United States leave Afghanistan. Among other things, he said that the U.S. had “wasted an enormous amount of blood and treasure” and “wasted lives” there, that the war was “nonsense,” and that instead we should “rebuild the USA.”

On Monday night, as president, Trump is expected to announce that he’s sending several thousand more American troops to fight in the 16-year war.

There are currently about 8,400 U.S. soldiers stationed there, as well as approximately 6,000 from other members of NATO. The number of American troops in Afghanistan peaked at 100,000 in 2011. A total of 3,539 coalition soldiers have died during the war.

Afghanistan was barely mentioned during the 2016 presidential campaign. The GOP platform did not say much on the subject. “A Republican president will work with all regional leaders to restore mutual trust,” it read. Trump said nothing about it during his convention and inaugural speeches, and essentially nothing in his campaign book, “Crippled America.”

During an October 2015 interview with CNN, Trump was asked whether he believed “that American boots should stay on the ground in Afghanistan.” He replied, “We made a terrible mistake getting involved there in the first place.” He added: “Are they going to be there for the next 200 years? At some point, what’s going on?”

However, he did qualify his statement. “I would leave the troops there, begrudgingly,” he said. “You probably have to because that thing will collapse about two seconds after they leave.” (A few weeks later Trump denied he’d said that the Afghanistan war was a mistake.)

Below, in reverse chronological order, are Trump’s statements on Twitter and television calling for the U.S. to withdraw.

November 2013:

March 2013:

January 2013:

December 2012:

September 2012:

August 2012:

March 2012:

Perhaps the clearest example of Trump’s former certainty about the need for withdrawal came in a March 2012 update to the video blog he used to promote “The Celebrity Apprentice” and burnish his own credentials as a political thinker.

“Afghanistan is a total and complete disaster,” Trump said in the first seconds of that vlog post (which was deleted from the Trump Organization’s YouTube channel after the 2016 election, but preserved by The Intercept).

“Let’s get with it, get out of Afghanistan,” Trump argued then. “We’ve wasted billions and billions of dollars, and more importantly, thousands and thousands of lives — not to mention all of these young men and women that come home and they really have problems.”

February 2012:

In this last tweet, Trump linked to a Fox and Friends interview in which he said, “What are we doing there? These people hate us. As soon as we leave, it’s all going to blow up anyway. And you say, ‘What are we doing there?’ We’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars, trillions of dollars on this nonsense. … What are we doing? We’re a debtor nation. We can’t build our own schools, yet we build schools in Afghanistan.”

December 2011:

On CNN, Trump declared that the U.S. should “get out” of Afghanistan, adding, “We have to rebuild our country. We’re rebuilding. You know, you go to Afghanistan. There is a school. It gets blown up. We rebuild it. We build a road to the school. They both get blown up. We rebuild. In the meantime, if you want to build a school in Brooklyn or Iowa or California, you can’t build them.”

October 2011:

Top photo: President Donald Trump waves after getting off Air Force One at Hagerstown Regional Airport in Hagerstown, Md., Aug. 18, 2017, en route to nearby Camp David, for a meeting with his national security team to discuss strategy for South Asia, including India, Pakistan and the way forward in Afghanistan.

IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.

What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. 

This is not hyperbole.

Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation.

Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.” 

The Intercept has long covered authoritarian governments, billionaire oligarchs, and backsliding democracies around the world. We understand the challenge we face in Trump and the vital importance of press freedom in defending democracy.

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IT’S BEEN A DEVASTATING year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.

We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.

In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.

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I’M BEN MUESSIG, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. It’s been a devastating year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.

We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.

In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.

That’s where you come in. Will you help us expand our reporting capacity in time to hit the ground running in 2026?

We’re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us?

Donate

Contact the author:

jon.schwarz@theintercept.com @Schwarz on X
robert.mackey@theintercept.com @RobertMackey on X

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