Ex–Trump Adviser Drops Bombshell About Trump’s Taliban Deal

Donald Trump may have made the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan worse for President Biden.

General H.R. McMaster told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Monday night that Trump, while president, sought to negotiate with the Taliban as U.S. troops began leaving Afghanistan, which undermined the Afghan government. As a result, the U.S. government forced the Afghan government to release 5,000 members of the Taliban.

The former national security adviser was on CNN to discuss his new book, At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. The revelation puts the chaos of the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan into greater context, as conservatives sought to lay much of the blame onto Biden and successfully pushed that narrative into media coverage.

It’s the latest damaging revelation from McMaster’s book. Last week, an early excerpt from the book detailed how Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin was able to manipulate Trump by playing on his “ego and insecurities.” On Monday, another newly revealed excerpt described meetings in the Oval Office as “exercises in competitive sycophancy” where Trump made particularly “outlandish” suggestions, including one instance in which he asked, “Why don’t we just bomb the drugs?” in regards to narcotics in Mexico.

McMaster is one of many of Trump’s former national security officials to criticize the now convicted felon for his conduct as president. One of his other former national security advisers, John Bolton, said earlier this month that Trump “can’t tell the difference between what’s true and what’s false.”

Former White House chief of staff John Kelly has described the former president as “a person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about.… A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law. There is nothing more that can be said.”

“God help us.”

Donald Trump gave another low-energy speech Monday during an appearance at the National Guard Association of the United States General Conference in Detroit.

Trump’s sleepy, staggered reading from his teleprompter focused largely on criticisms of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, and Kamala Harris who Trump has knocked as being the “last person in the room” with Biden before the decision was made. Trump, who reportedly viewed Afghanistan as a lost cause during his time in office, has repeatedly blamed Biden for abandoning $85 billion worth of equipment in Afghanistan, although it was more like $7 billion. 

Trump has also blamed Biden’s accelerated withdrawal timeline for the deaths of 13 U.S. service members, who were killed in a terrorist attack at the Hamid Karzai International Airport that also killed 170 Afghans. The Republican nominee appeared at a memorial honoring the three-year anniversary of the attack on Monday morning, but by the afternoon, he seemed confused by the event. 

“And the fake news doesn’t want to talk about it.” Trump complained on stage. “They don’t even talk about the three-year anniversary—a terrible word to use, but that’s what they’re calling it, an ‘anniversary.’ I think of ‘anniversary’ as a little bit different, but it’s three years now,” Trump said. Of course, “anniversary” simply refers to the date that an event took place in a previous year—its alternative meaning to Trump is yet unclear. 

On stage, Trump promised he would ask for the resignations of “every single senior official who touched the Afghanistan calamity to be on his desk at noon on Inauguration Day.”

“You have to fire people when they do a bad job. We never fire anybody. You gotta fire ‘em, like  on The Apprentice!” Trump said. As Trump reminisced about his old NBC show—from which he was fired in 2015 for making derogatory comments about immigrants—he seemed momentarily excited.

“You’re fired! You did a lousy job,” he said, imagining his first day in the White House, as the audience applauded. His acting out did little to invigorate him, though, as he proceeded on a monotonous speech. 

Trump complained about “losers” he’d fired writing books about him, possibly a reference to Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster’s blistering account of Trump’s White House, which is set to be released Tuesday. 

Trump told a winding story about traveling to Iraq to see about dealing with ISIS without rest, “unlike other people that we know,” he joked, a strange shot at Biden, who is no longer running for president. 

“He’d rest and then leave—there’d be no meeting!” Trump quipped all the same. 

Trump continued to insist that Afghanistan was selling the $7 $85 billion in equipment the U.S. had “stupidly left them,” complaining that Washington had left night vision goggles behind. “How stupid these people were,” Trump said. 

Under Trump’s administration, “we were getting out, but we were getting out with strength, and dig-ny,” the former president boasted, slurring slightly. 

Trump continued to falsely claim that the sheer fact of his presidency had kept U.S. military members safe. “We didn’t have one soldier killed—even shot at in 18 months. And then these guys took over, and uh, big lack of respect. But they had a lot of respect for us during that period,” Trump said, calling himself “the first president in decades who started no new wars.”

Trump’s claim that no soldiers were killed for 18 months in Afghanistan is blatantly untrue, according to Reuters. During Trump’s presidency, there were 45 hostile deaths and 63 total deaths, with no 18-month gap in casualties, including when Trump was negotiating an Afghanistan withdrawal, according to the Defense Casualty Analysis System for Operation Freedom’s Sentinel database.

Trump went on to brag that he was “very good at using a telephone,” and whine about Ukraine’s “surge” into Russia, which he claimed would result in World War III. 

He continued to criticize U.S. support of Ukraine against Russia, claiming that as a result of the U.S.’s tremendous support, its own military was running out of ammunition. It was a haphazard reference to a high-profile report on U.S. national defense that claimed the U.S. would likely run out of munitions within “three to four weeks” in the event of a war with China. 

“That’s a lousy thing,” Trump said, claiming that if he were president, he would not have released such a report. “You don’t do reports that say we’re going to lose to China in a war, stupid people do that.”

“These people are just so destructive,” Trump said of U.S. officials responsible for the supposed munitions blight. “So—you know I always look for good words. Highly sophisticated, [I’m] highly educated. I like sophisticated words, but there’s only one word I can—stupid, they’re stupid people.”

The classified documents case against Donald Trump is not dead yet, as special counsel Jack Smith is asking a federal appeals court to reinstate it. 

In July, Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the 42 felony charges against the former president and convicted felon, ruling that Smith’s appointment to the case was unconstitutional. On Monday, Smith appealed to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the dismissal is “at odds with widespread and longstanding appointment practices in the Department of Justice and across the government.” 

Trump allegedly broke the law by retaining classified documents from his presidency at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and then refusing to return them to the federal government. Cannon was criticized for her handling of the classified documents case, bogging down proceedings by entertaining questionable motions from Trump’s defense and seemingly favoring the Republican presidential nominee. Her experience was called into question by legal experts including one of Trump’s former lawyers, Ty Cobb. A ruling in Smith’s favor could result in a new judge taking over the case, though notably Smith did not ask for Cannon’s removal in his brief to the 11th circuit.

Cannon’s dismissal came after the Supreme Court ruled that American presidents have immunity for their “official acts” while in office, throwing the case’s future into doubt. And even if the appeals court overturns Cannon’s ruling, there is no timeframe on when a new trial would take place, meaning that it would almost certainly come several months after the November elections. This raises the possibility that Trump could return to the White House with the case underway, and then would simply ask his new attorney general to drop the charges.  

Trump still faces federal charges for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election in connection with the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The Supreme Court’s ruling has also put that case in limbo, with a hearing to determine the next steps postponed until September. The former president also faces criminal charges in Georgia for attempting to overturn the state’s presidential election results, but that case is stalled over attempts by Trump’s legal team to have its prosecutor, Fani Willis, thrown off of the case.  

Right now, the only criminal case against Trump to proceed to a trial verdict is his hush-money case in New York, where the Republican presidential nominee was convicted on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. If Smith has his way, Trump may one day face a criminal trial again.  

Hundreds of staffers that served under President George W. Bush, Arizona Senator John McCain, and Utah Senator Mitt Romney jointly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday, writing that another presidency under Donald Trump would be “untenable.”

“Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected,” the group wrote in a letter. “The alternative, however, is simply untenable. At home, another four years of Donald Trump’s chaotic leadership, this time focused on advancing the dangerous goals of Project 2025, will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions.”

“Abroad, democratic movements will be irreparably jeopardized as Trump and his acolyte JD Vance kowtow to dictators like Vladimir Putin while turning their backs on our allies,” the letter continued. “We can’t let that happen.”

The letter received 238 signatures in all—significantly more than endorsed the 2020 edition of this letter, in which 150 former Republican staffers announced their intention to vote for President Joe Biden.

Some of the signees include former McCain chiefs of staff Mark Salter and Chris Koch, former McCain legislative director Joe Donoghue, McCain’s 2008 press secretary Jennifer Lux, and George H.W. Bush chief of staff Jean Becker.

The endorsement underscores how divided traditional Republicans feel from other conservatives as Trump, Project 2025, and increasingly extreme factions of the right tighten their grip on the future of the party. Some of that tension has actually been stoked by Trump himself: While running for president in 2015, Trump—who famously avoided the Vietnam War draft with a timely diagnosis of bone spurs—mocked McCain for being taken prisoner while serving in Vietnam, declaring that the 2008 Republican presidential nominee was “not a war hero” and that he “like[s] people that weren’t captured.”

But Trump’s anti-military rhetoric isn’t just in the past. Instead, it’s been a point of contention for the MAGA candidate even in recent weeks. Earlier this month, Trump came under fire for arguing that the Presidential Medal of Freedom he awarded to one of his billionaire donors was “much better” than the nation’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor. That comment rubbed veterans the wrong way, who connected Trump’s disrespectful rhetoric to a 2020 Atlantic report that caught the former president repeatedly referring to fallen soldiers as “suckers and losers.”

Donald Trump, unsurprisingly, thinks Robert F. Kennedy’s endorsement of him is a “big” deal.

“He’s a great guy, respected by everybody,” a low-energy Trump said on Friday after Kennedy announced he was suspending his campaign.

Fact check: RFK Jr. is not respected by everybody. Even his own extended family regularly pillories him in the press.

Over the weekend, Trump reposted pro-Kennedy messages on Truth Social, including one referring to Kennedy and Trump as an “anti-establishment ticket.” Maybe J.D. Vance really is in danger of losing his job.

It’s been quite the journey for Kennedy. He entered the 2024 race as a Democrat, switched to independent, and then allegedly begged Kamala Harris for a spot in her administration. Her campaign ignored him.

But Trump, desperate for any kind of advantage against Harris, has welcomed Kennedy with open arms. This, despite the fact that Kennedy allegedly said earlier this summer that Trump was “a terrible human being. The worse [sic] president ever and barely human. He is probably a sociopath.”

On Sunday, Kennedy claimed that he will pave the way for more Democrats to jump ship to the Republicans, saying in a Fox News interview that the Trump campaign will soon make a “series of announcements about other Democrats who are joining his 2024 campaign.”

Meta—the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp—has just hired Dustin Carmack, a former adviser to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s doomed presidential campaign and an ex–Project 2025 employee.

Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic instructor and attorney Alejandra Caraballo revealed the news on X (formerly Twitter) Monday afternoon, providing screenshots from Carmack’s LinkedIn profile, which he has since deactivated.

Caraballo pointed out that Meta’s hire was likely made to deflect criticism from conservatives—but it’s also meant to augment the firm’s interactions with state governments, as the company has “political positions to limit regulation and buy influence.”

But the move comes amid a period in which Meta’s treatment of users—specifically the type of user who runs afoul of much of what Project 2025 wants to do to the United States—has been called into question. In recent months, the LGBTQ+ rights group GLAAD has criticized Meta’s content moderation policies on its platforms, saying that they were effectively encouraging an “epidemic of anti-transgender hate” on their social media sites. The report showed a significant increase in anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ posts on Meta’s sites, noting that transgender people were routinely called “sexual predators,” “perverts,” and “groomers” in many of those posts.

The Project 2025 manifesto, a conservative playbook for a future Republican presidential administration, has been criticized and derided by Democrats for many of the regressive policies it envisions, especially for those that would dramatically curtail LGBTQ+ and abortion rights. One passage states flat out that “Children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.”

Carmack’s arrival at Meta also coincides with the company’s restrictions on “political content” on Instagram and Threads instituted earlier this year, which limit the reach of accounts that post about politics and social issues. The move sparked protests from journalists, activists, and even meme creators, among others, for discouraging posts about LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and other major social issues, particularly in a presidential election year.

Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance have tried in vain to distance themselves from Project 2025; it’s proven to be a daunting task due to their extensive ties to the manifesto and the people who sired it into existence. Vance even wrote the foreword to a new book written by Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts. Meta will likely try to deflect any associations with the far-right policy wishlist soon enough, although that may be in vain considering Carmack’s role at Meta will be to reassure right-wing conservatives that their social media platforms are an asset to the cause.

Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp may actually be preparing to take action against three members of the state election board who have been at the center of claims of ethics violations.

Kemp responded Monday to an ethics complaint filed by Democratic state Senator Nabilah Islam Parkes alleging that Rick Jeffares, Janice Johnston, and Janelle King, who have been touted by Donald Trump as “pitbulls” for “victory,” broke rules to impose last-minute changes to Georgia’s election procedures.

The accusations stem from a July 12 meeting where the trio passed two new election rules, but failed to provide adequate notice about the meeting to the public or the two Democratic board members—a possible violation of the Open Meetings Act. The first rule required county election boards to post daily ballot counts online, and the second increased the number of partisan monitors during the vote-counting process. After the group approved the new rules, they were cheered on by one of Trump’s election-denying allies.

Earlier this month, the Georgia State Election Board voted 3–2 in favor of yet another new rule, which required a “reasonable inquiry” into any discrepancy between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters, before certifying election results. This would make it significantly easier for county election officials to delay or refuse certification of election results in populous areas such as Fulton or DeKalb counties in November.

Last week, Islam Parkes filed a complaint with the state, alleging the group had violated the state ethics code in addition to the Open Meetings Act. “The election board is supposed to certify election results and so passing illegal rules to undermine the integrity of our elections is extremely concerning,” Islam Parkes told local outlet Fox 5. She said that the trio should be removed from the board immediately.

In a statement to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Monday, Kemp’s office said they were looking into the complaints against the trio.

“This office has received Senator Nabilah Islam Parkes and other’s letters alleging ethics violations by members of the State Elections Board. Due to uncertainty regarding whether this office has authority to act under Code 45-10-4 in response to these complaints, we have sought the Attorney General’s advice regarding the application of statute to the letters,” the statement said. “We will respond following receipt of the advice and further evaluation of the letters.”

Kemp’s office’s statement signals a positive direction for the Republican governor, who may take action to undo the trio’s handiwork or even unseat them. But it’s unclear just how concerned Kemp is about the threat the group poses, given the fact that he formally endorsed Trump just last week, even after Trump has made several digs at Kemp over the last month for refusing to overturn Georgia’s election results in 2020.

“We gotta win from the top of the ticket on down,” Kemp said. “I’ve been saying consistently for a long time we cannot afford another four years of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and I think Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are to be even worse. So we need to send Donald Trump back to the White House.”

A group of Georgia officials gathered at the state capitol Monday, urging Kemp to take action. Representative Lucy McBath called on Kemp to “hold the State Elections Board accountable,” and called the state’s election board “an equal co-conspirator in the effort to suppress our votes.”

Before Islam Parkes filed her complaint, the former chair of the Fulton County Board of Elections also filed a similar ethics complaint earlier this month. In July, government ethics watchdog American Oversight filed a lawsuit against the board, accusing the trio of violating Georgia’s Open Meetings Act.

Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger has also criticized the last-minute rule changes. “Activists seeking to impose last-minute changes in election procedures outside of the legislative process undermine voter confidence and burden election workers,” he said earlier this month.

Raffensperger refused to help overturn his state’s 2020 election results, and he has held firm against Trump ever since. Raffensperger has yet to endorse anyone in the 2024 presidential election.

Since 2020, Georgia has had the highest number of certification refusals of anywhere in the country—and remains the likely epicenter for Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2024. A report from American Doom found that at least 22 people who’d pushed election-denying conspiracy theories were employed as election officials in Georgia—including two on its board of elections.

Former President Donald Trump suddenly has a big debate concern: He doesn’t want the microphones to be hot at all times during the upcoming ABC News tilt between he and Vice President Kamala Harris, scheduled for September 10. 

As the presidential campaigns continue to have mini-debates about the debates, here’s a new topic of discussion that has the two camps dissenting: whether mics should be turned on for the entirety of the event, and thus capable of capturing each candidate’s audible reactions throughout the proceedings, or whether they should only be on during each candidate’s appointed time to speak. 

“We have told ABC and other networks seeking to host a possible October debate that we believe both candidates’ mics should be live throughout the full broadcast,” the Harris campaign’s senior communications adviser, Brian Fallon, told Politico Playbook on Sunday. 

This is a reversal from the agreement wrought with President Joe Biden’s campaign, who had previously agreed with Trump’s team about the scheduled debates—as well as the muted mics back in June.  

Now, Trump’s campaign is accusing Kamala Harris of trying to change the rules of the debates. “Enough with the games. We accepted the ABC debate under the exact same terms as the CNN debate,” Jason Miller, senior adviser for Trump, told Playbook Sunday night. “We said no changes to the agreed upon rules.” 

Interestingly, the Trump campaign wanted mics to remain hot throughout the debate back in 2020. Harris’s campaign holds that the microphones should remain on during presidential debates, which is more often the norm, perhaps hoping to highlight Trump’s bad temper and outbursts. 

“Given how shook [Trump] seems by her, he’s very prone to having intemperate outbursts and … I think the campaign would want viewers to hear [that],” said one person familiar with the debate negotiations. 

“Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own,” said Fallon. “We suspect Trump’s team has not even told their boss about this dispute because it would be too embarrassing to admit they don’t think he can handle himself against Vice President Harris without the benefit of a mute button.”

Judge Aileen Cannon’s future on Donald Trump’s classified documents case is hanging on by a thread.

On Tuesday, special counsel Jack Smith will deliver an opening brief to the Eleventh Circuit, initiating an appeal trial to reverse Cannon’s July decision that effectively threw the case out. At the heart of Cannon’s ruling was the conclusion that Smith’s appointment to the special counsel role was unconstitutional, and therefore his work on the case was illegitimate.

“Notably, no other judge to consider the issue has ruled that way, and prosecutions conducted by special counsels have been routine, if infrequent,” wrote former prosecutor Joyce Vance on Sunday in her Substack Civil Disclosure.

The only task before the Eleventh Circuit court will be to determine if Cannon’s ruling was correct or incorrect—after all, the issue at hand is about who can bring the case, not whether the case can be brought at all. It will not touch upon the merits of the special counsel’s case against the former president. Still, Trump’s team will likely try to derail the trial by infusing it with other issues, mainly a recent ruling by the Supreme Court that granted a far-reaching expansion of presidential immunity.

“That issue isn’t properly before the court on this appeal, and the Eleventh Circuit applies very strict rules about only hearing issues that are,” Vance wrote. “We’ll see if that holds up in Trump’s case, as it should.”

“But we’ll likely see the word immunity more than once in Trump’s brief, even though this is only supposed to be the government’s appeal of the Judge’s decision against them, dismissing the case because Judge Cannon believes that the Special Counsel’s appointment was unconstitutional,” she added.

If the government wins the appeal, they will be able to ask the court to assign a new judge to the trial. Though, ultimately, the future of the classified documents trial is contingent on the outcome of the November election. Should Trump lose, the case will move forward regardless of whether or not the government wins the appeal. But should he win, Trump could use his presidential powers to wipe the federal case off the map.

The right wing is trying to bring back birtherism (the dumb kind) for Kamala Harris. Pro-Trump influencer and failed congressional candidate Laura Loomer tried to start a conspiracy on X (formerly Twitter, the company whose doors she once handcuffed herself to for reasons beyond understanding) Sunday night, posting immigration documents and accusing Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, of committing immigration fraud.

Loomer claimed that the forms she surfaced show that Harris’s mother failed to account for one of her two children on the documents, an omission Loomer said was tantamount to fraud. Unfortunately for the would-be sleuth, her handle on the paper trail was shoddy; as X’s users quickly documented in a Community Note, Loomer had made an omission of her own: The second page of the form in question showed that it was filed months before her second child, Maya Harris, was born.

Loomer hasn’t acknowledged the correction on X, and has continued to post nonstop since Sunday—promoting Donald Trump and trying to drum up other controversies. This hasn’t stopped others on the social media platform from pointing out her (deliberate?) error.

Loomer has a reputation not only for bigotry, but for trafficking in conspiracy theories that have little, if any, basis in the truth. In July, she accused gun violence survivor and former Representative Gabby Giffords of being “brain dead” and having her husband, Senator Mark Kelly, write social media posts for her. This was easily disproved by Giffords’s campaign appearances on behalf of Harris, as well as her speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X, Loomer was banned from the site, only for Musk to reinstate her. The noted Islamophobe is a favorite of Donald Trump Jr., who has recommended her as a possible White House press secretary if his father gets elected in November. But, she also has her enemies on the right, including Trump acolyte Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has called her “mentally unstable and a documented liar.”

As Trump and the MAGA movement desperately try to come up with effective attacks against Harris, it seems that conspiracies of old, used against Barack Obama, are getting recycled in the hopes that they’ll hurt her image. So far, they have been easily parried.