During the gut-wrenching presidential debate last Thursday, Donald Trump spoke with revealing candor about two hot-button issues which I have addressed at length in SpyTalk, the Substack website run by my old friend Jeff Stein.
Each time Trump vented, Biden blew an opportunity to call him out. Too bad, because what Trump said could have opened him up to blistering takedowns.
Afghan Evacuation:
At various points in the debate Trump excoriated Biden for his handling of the emergency airlift out of Kabul in August 2021, in one instance calling it “the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country.”
In an article I wrote for SpyTalk in the fall of 2022, I dubbed that operation a masterpiece of crisis management.
Why so?
Because that’s the way it stacks up against the only recent precedent, the Vietnam pullout of April 1975, which I witnessed first-hand as one of the last CIA officers to be choppered off the embassy roof.
As I noted in SpyTalk, in a mere two weeks, the U.S. and its coalition partners in Afghanistan evacuated twice as many endangered souls — 123,000 — as had fled Saigon with official help during the entire final month of the Vietnam war.
On top of this, the airlift saved many more high-risk individuals than escaped Saigon under U.S. auspices.
This was accomplished despite the fact that the intelligence agencies Biden had inherited from Trump gave him only a three-day warning that the enemy was at the gates. By contrast, in Vietnam we had many such warnings over a month-long period and still failed to summon the choppers in time.
Apart from myopic intelligence, Biden faced another handicap left over from his predecessor. The Doha agreement, which Trump’s representatives negotiated in early 2020, did little more than mandate a U.S. troop pullout in a year’s time. There was no provision for any complementary political accommodation to head off disaster.
During the early days of the Biden administration, Secretary of State Tony Blinken worked feverishly to make up for this deficit by attempting to arrange reconciliation talks between the two sides. But by then Taliban forces had so thoroughly undermined government security measures in rural Afghanistan they had no incentive to bargain.
The Doha agreement, a Trump sellout if there ever was one, was so slap-dash that it made Kissinger’s disastrous ceasefire pact for Vietnam look like a miracle of Metternichian statecraft.
Trump-Putin-Ukraine:
Elsewhere in Thursday’s debate, Trump dropped comments about Putin’s designs on Ukraine that smacked of inside knowledge and even collusion.
They should have brought President Biden to a high boil but whizzed right past him. Though most of the press ignored the remarks as well, they dovetailed with the main through-line of a two–parter I posted to SpyTalk back in April 2022.
In that commentary, I cited ample evidence that Trump’s aide, Paul Manafort, working with his own deputy, Konstantin Kalimnik, whom Senate investigators later identified as a Russian spy, had drawn up a plan to betray Ukraine to Russia with Trump’s help and blessing.
The scheme was conceived as payback to Putin, a way of rewarding him for the influence operations he waged covertly in 2016 to bolster Trump’s election prospects and torpedo Hillary’s.
To square accounts, Trump was expected as president to assist Putin in setting up a Russian protectorate in eastern Ukraine through diplomatic maneuvering and covert warfare. The breakaway entity would have been headed by a Putin puppet, the defrocked Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych.
As I pointed out in my article, Manafort and Kilimnik completed the plan in August 2016, funneled a copy to Trump’s transition team right after the election. and continued to flog it to White House contacts for the next year and a half.
The key question I was never able to answer was whether Trump himself had ever seen the plan. It got honorable mention in official channels and open publications to which he was privy, and was thoroughly examined by his official pollster, But I could find no rock-solid proof that Trump had laid eyes on it.
One tantalizing clue emerged right after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. Speaking to a friendly CPAC audience, ex-President Trump hinted that he had a far better understanding of Putin’s objectives than he had ever let on.
“I was with Putin a lot,” he told his rapt listeners, in reference to his time in the White House. “Someday, I’ll tell you exactly what we talked about. And he did have an affinity — there’s no question about it — for Ukraine. I said, ‘Never let it happen, better not let it happen’.”
During Thursday’s debate Trump returned to the same story line while attempting to blame Biden for Putin’s cross-border aggression. In Trump’s telling, the trigger was Biden’s alleged bungling of the Afghan evacuation.
“When Putin saw that, he said, ‘You know what? I think we’re gonna go in [to Ukraine] and maybe take my …’ This was his dream. I talked to him about it. His dream,” Trump recounted.
The record shows that, as president, Trump conducted more than 16 private discussions with Putin, including during the Helsinki summit in 2018.
Shortly before that infamous event, Manafort and Kilimnik updated their Ukraine proposal, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. The conference would have provided a perfect opportunity for Putin and Trump to discuss the Manafort draft privately face to face. If they did so, and if, for some reason, Trump’s attitude at the time was “better not let it happen,” his behavior at the subsequent press conference, where he fawned all over Putin and trashed US intelligence reporting on Russian election tampering, begins to make sense.
It is no stretch to imagine that he was trying to compensate Putin for favors not yet delivered on Ukraine.
In referring to Ukraine as Putin’s “dream,” Debater Trump betrayed a lingering affinity for the Russian’s mindset. And if there is something more nefarious at work in Trump’s own psyche – a lingering sense of indebtedness to Putin — God help President Zelensky, NATO and all the rest of us if this deeply compromised man becomes president again.