AMAC Exclusive
As President Biden faces an unprecedented international catastrophe thanks to his mismanagement of the American exit from Afghanistan, amounting to the most jarring crisis of his presidency thus far, former president Donald J. Trump was back on the road this weekend in Cullman, Alabama for a rally on Saturday night, his first since early July.
Organized in support of Congressman Mo Brooks’ (R-AL) candidacy for the U.S. Senate, the event was also the 45th president’s first visit to Alabama since the 2020 election. The state was the site of one of Trump’s first Make America Great Again rallies of the 2016 election cycle.
Upon taking the stage, Trump wasted no time in calling out the Biden administration for its calamitous first seven months: “One year ago this month, in my nomination acceptance speech,” he said, “I warned the entire country of the disastrous consequences of a Biden presidency.” He continued: “Not only have my predictions come 100 percent true, but it’s even worse than any of us could have imagined in our worst nightmares.”
After hitting President Biden for the country’s rapidly rising inflation, skyrocketing crime rates, and the Biden administration’s bungled messaging on the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump immediately pivoted to the Biden team’s forced evacuation of U.S. military forces and American citizens from Afghanistan. Trump lambasted Biden’s handling of the crisis as “a great stain on the reputation of our country” and “the greatest foreign policy humiliation in the history of the United States of America.”
Contrasting the Biden administration’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan with the Trump administration’s conditions-based withdrawal plan that would have included the removal of American citizens and military equipment before United States military forces left the country, Trump assured the crowd that our nation’s current predicament could have been easily avoided. “Biden’s botched exit in Afghanistan is the most astonishing display of gross incompetence by a nation’s leader perhaps at any time that anybody’s ever seen,” he declared. “All Joe Biden had to do was follow our plan.” “The issue here,” he added, “is not about whether to leave Afghanistan. The issue is Joe Biden’s staggering incompetence and gross negligence.”
Trump then turned to immigration, condemning Biden’s failure to stop the massive illegal migration into the United States. “In a matter of mere months, Biden has thrown our southern border wide open. When I left office, we handed the new administration the most secure border in U.S. history and they turned it into the greatest border disaster in American history, probably anywhere in the world,” Trump said. Citing Border Patrol’s apprehension of 210,000 illegal aliens in July alone, a 21-year high, Trump ripped Biden for revoking his administration’s border security policies, stating that his administration understood that “immigration security is national security.”
Prior to introducing Congressman Brooks, whom Trump has endorsed in Alabama’s upcoming Senate primary election, the former president also spoke at length about election security and the need to strengthen election integrity laws.
As next year’s midterms elections loom, President Trump has clearly maintained his immense popularity within the Republican Party—and his influence is only likely to grow. Since leaving office, he has traveled the country to support conservative candidates in upcoming House and Senate races, hoping to further unify the GOP and wrestle back control of Congress from Democrats next year. Most recently, a Trump-endorsed candidate in a House primary in Ohio’s 15th congressional district easily defeated 11 Republican rivals, many of whom had ties to the GOP establishment, demonstrating the unwaning power of a Trump endorsement. Moreover, with a laundry list of self-inflicted crises plaguing the country under Biden’s leadership, President Trump’s America First approach to policymaking seems to be more vindicated with each passing day.
President Trump has repeatedly teased the possibility of running for President for a third time, and the rumors are only likely to increase in the coming months. Whether he ultimately does so or not, his status as his party’s kingmaker remains indisputable. As the Biden agenda continues to collapse and its popularity continues to dwindle, Americans of all political stripes are beginning to miss the Trump years and are unfortunately coming to understand first-hand the radicalism of the Democrat agenda. And in the months leading up to the midterm elections, that trend is only sure to accelerate.