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“Let’s keep in mind, Mike Pompeo met with the Taliban. As Donald Trump was publicly saying, ‘We have to get out of Afghanistan at all costs. It’s not worth it,’ Mike Pompeo meets with the Taliban and tries to negotiate something.” He added: “They set this up to fail. But always, of course, Joe Biden could have easily turned this around, and instead used it as the excuse to get out.”
— Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) placed blame on the Trump administration for the unfolding crisis in Afghanistan, saying its 2020 agreement with the Taliban sowed the seeds for the United States’ turbulent exit from the country, CNN reports.
20 million
“Joe Biden promised he’d bring in a competent, tested team to run the pandemic response, set ambitious vaccination targets and impose strict public health guidelines,” Politico reports. “After a week on the job, Biden’s team is still trying to locate upwards of 20 million vaccine doses that have been sent to states — a mystery that has hampered plans to speed up the national vaccination effort.”
“He has been so intensely focused on all of the implications of coronavirus and the economic problems that he frankly had not thought about it. He had a checklist and this came up in late August. You end up with only so much brain space and adrenaline and that is what happened.”
— Newt Gingrich, when asked by Politico why President Trump has not come up with a second term agenda.
“It was inevitable that Trump would face a crisis immune to tweets or stupid memes or insulting nicknames. The damage he does to everyone and everything around him has become an iron law of American politics, an invariable and inevitable process. Still, I didn’t think it extended to everyone in the country; that it would produce actual bodies stacked like cordwood in a preventable, slow-rolling pandemic. When I wrote ‘Everything Trump Touches Dies,’ I didn’t mean it literally. … Donald Trump seems intent on proving me wrong.”
53% to 34%
“By a 53% to 34% margin, more believe a quicker response from the federal government could have slowed the spread of coronavirus in the U.S. than say it is so contagious that nothing could have prevented it spreading the way it has. Some 30% of Republicans join 73% of Democrats in saying the government could have made a difference had it acted faster.” — Fox News poll
“He was a sick and depraved man, and now he’s dead. He’s dead. Dead as a door nail.”
— President Trump, quoted by CBS News, addressing the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, while adding “another president should’ve gotten him.”
3
First Read notes that in less than three weeks, President Trump has made three different retreats: Reaching a deal with Mexico to avert tariffs – a deal that largely consisted of actions that Mexico had already agreed to; backing down on military strikes against Iran for shooting down a U.S. drone; delaying his plan for nationwide raids to deport undocumented immigrants.
