Former President Donald Trump told thousands of supporters in Commerce, Georgia, on Saturday night that while his critics faulted his “personality,” it was his personality that kept the U.S. out of war for the four years he was in office.
Trump was referring to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, which President Joe Biden failed to deter, and which he is currently in Europe trying to contain.
Trump said:
And you remember this: the fake news media said my personality would get us into war. But actually, as it turned out, it was my personality that kept us the hell out of war.
[Cheers]
And it’s been accurately reported, I was the only president in four decades who did not get America into any new conflicts. Instead, I brought our troops back home from Syria, Iraq, Somalia, and many other places, and would have done it very quickly from Afghanistan, we were all set. And you know, we didn’t lose one soldier in Afghanistan for eighteen months. I spoke to Abdul [Ghani Baradar], the leader of the Taliban. I said, “Abdult, don’t do it, Abdul.”
[Laughter]
And the fake news said, “Oh, he’s speaking to the Taliban!” Who the hell else am I supposed to speak to?
Biden, playing on the hoax that Trump had somehow “colluded” with Russia and the claim that he was too close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, campaigned in 2020 on the idea that he would be tougher on Russia.
But Biden canceled Trump’s sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany (while barring the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the U.S.), renewed the New START nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and limited lethal weapons shipments to Ukraine.
As former Trump foreign police aide Matt Pottinger told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, “there was a genuine unpredictability about President Trump and what he might or might not do, and that may have, more frequently than people appreciate, caused [Chinese premier] Xi [Jinping] and Putin to delay some of their plans.”
Trump spoke about a wide variety of themes for roughly an hour and-a-half, and reported that he made a hole-in-one earlier in the day on the golf course.
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