Former President Donald Trump is sounding off on the ongoing situation in Afghanistan, calling the chaos the most humiliating moment in American history.
In an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity, Trump said President Joe Biden has humiliated the United States more than any other president in history.
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"It is a terrible time for our country. I don't think in all of the years our country has ever been so humiliated. I don't know what you call it – a military defeat or a psychological defeat, there has never been anything like what's happened here," Trump said.
"It's a great thing that we're getting out, but nobody has ever handled a withdrawal worse than Joe Biden," Trump continued. "This is the greatest embarrassment, I believe, in the history of our country."
Trump went on to say it was the "worst decision in the history of our country" to invade the middle east in the first place. He said a large airstrike could have been retaliation enough for the September 11 attacks.
"We have the greatest military in the world and we're giving it a very bad reputation with what's happening. We took this horrible place, I mean, a place that just, we shouldn't have been involved. It was a horrible decision going into the middle east," he said. "It's turned out to be quicksand. We've destroyed the middle east. You think it's better than it was 20, 21 years ago? It's much worse. It was a horrible decision."
The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan two weeks before the U.S. was set to completely withdraw all troops after a costly two-decade war. Insurgents stormed across the country, capturing all major cities in a matter of days.
The former president said chaotic scenes of Afghan citizens desperately clinging to U.S. military planes that were sent to evacuate embassy staffers will forever serve as a reminder of the humiliation.
"I looked at that big monster cargo plane... with people grabbing the side and trying to get flown out of Afghanistan because of their fear, their incredible fear – and they're blowing off of the plane from 2,000 feet up in the air. Nobody has ever seen anything like that," he said. "That blows the helicopters in Vietnam away. That's not even a contest. This has been the most humiliating period of time that I've ever seen."
Biden on Tuesday blamed Trump for the fallout, saying his administration was tied to a deal inherited from his predecessor. Trump, however, defended the agreement his administration made with the Taliban to remove U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 1, calling it a "great deal" that spared American lives.
"I spoke on numerous occasions to the head of the Taliban and we had very strong conversation. I told him upfront... 'let me just tell you right now that if anything happens to Americans or anybody else or if you ever come over to our land, we will hit you with a force that no country has ever been hit with before. A force so great to that you won't even believe it,'" Trump said. "We lost no soldiers in the last year-and-a-half because of me and because of the understanding that we had... We lost no soldiers in Afghanistan because they knew I wasn't going to put up with it."
Trump said he never had any confidence in Afghan President Ashraf Ghani or the Afghan military to uphold the country.
"I knew they weren't going to fight," Trump explained. "The fact is, they're among the highest-paid soldiers in the world. They were doing it for a paycheck. Because once we stopped, once we left, they stopped fighting... The fact is, our country was paying the Afghan soldiers a fortune. So we were sort of bribing them to fight, and that's not what it's all about."
