On Tuesday’s edition of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” host Joe Scarborough blasted Republicans over their hypocrisy on the Afghanistan chaos following the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and criticized President Joe Biden’s handling of the situation — but said he didn’t want to hear any criticism of the troop withdrawal from Donald Trump or his former officials.
Scarborough spent most of the segment bashing the Biden administration for leaving the country to be quickly overtaken by the Taliban, saying they betrayed Afghan allies and the sacrifice made by American troops, but he placed much of the blame for the crisis on the former president.
“It didn’t have to be this way,” Scarborough said. “You’re going to hear from a lot of people at the Biden White House, we’re certainly hearing from a lot of viewers, this was Donald Trump’s idea, this was Donald Trump’s deadline. Donald Trump was attacking Joe Biden for not getting out quickly enough. [Former secretary of state Mike] Pompeo had promised that we would be out by spring of 2021. Most of the criticism coming from Donald Trump and people close to him against Biden was that Biden didn’t leave soon enough, so that’s out there. It’s all in writing.”
“It’s why Donald Trump doesn’t have any room to say anything or Pompeo or any of those people that were pushing to get us out even more quickly,” he added. “That said, the buck stops with the president of the United States. He said that yesterday, and for people who want to know why this happened, that aren’t just looking at this through the ideological lenses, you know, we talked about it on the show for six months now. This is a guy [Biden] who hated [former Afghan president Hamid] Karzai back in 2009, famously got up, threw his napkin down and said, ‘This dinner is over,’ and left when Karzai was president because of the rampant corruption, because of the fact we were spending billions and billions of dollars, tax dollars to try to build up that country, build up that military, and it was all being squandered and people were getting extraordinarily rich.”
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However, Scarborough said, no matter how much Trump was to blame for the debacle, Biden would endure the political cost.
“But that said, again, we recognize that, but at the end of the day, how effective is this pointing at the guy who was the last president — how effective is that going to be politically for Joe Biden when he himself said yesterday, the buck stops here?” Scarborough said.
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