Former President Donald Trump, already facing criticism over an aide pushing aside an official at Arlington National Cemetery, has been caught misleading Gold Star families over troop deaths during his administration, according to a Washington Post analysis that gave him two Pinocchios.
In the TikTok video Trump's campaign filmed at the cemetery, marking the third anniversary of a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. military personnel during the evacuation of Afghanistan in 2021, Trump attempts to make the case that he has been a far better commander in chief of the armed forces than President Joe Biden.
"We lost 13 great, great people, what a horrible day it was," Trump said in the video, with clips of him laying wreaths at soldiers' gravestones and talking to members of Gold Star families. "We didn't lose one person in 18 months and then took over that disaster, the leaving of Afghanistan."
Trump's phrasing suggests that no troops were killed in Afghanistan during the last 18 months of his presidency, which an analysis of the Defense Casualty Analysis System, a Department of Defense database, proves to be false. The Washington Post confirmed that there was no 18-month period in Trump's presidency that did not see combat fatalities in Afghanistan; during the last 18 months of his presidency before Biden took over, the database shows 12 deaths from hostile action in that period.
The last two deaths were Javier Jaguar Gutierrez of San Antonio and Antonio Rey Rodriguez of Las Cruces, New Mexico, who were killed in February 2020. Trump and then-Vice President Mike Pence greeted the returning bodies at Dover Air Force Base. Those deaths occurred 11 months before the end of his presidency, while the suicide bombing at Kabul Airport took place in August 2021, seven months after Biden took office. That adds up to 18 months, but it's not what Trump was claiming in the video.
Trump, who negotiated the withdrawal from Afghanistan that Biden later implemented, has bragged about the 18-month claim at rallies across the country.
“You know, they were executing a lot of our soldiers. And I spoke to him, I said, ‘Abdul, don’t do it anymore. There’ll be no more,'" he said at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, referring Abdul Rahman al-Logari, the Islamic State-Khorasan member who an investigative report by the Department of Defense identified as the suicide bomber. "Anyway, I said it pretty tough. And you know what? For 18 months, we didn’t have one American soldier killed in Afghanistan. And then I left, and then I left, and there’s a bunch of incompetent people took over, and it all started up again.”
