“Good Fighters“ and “Great Negotiators”: Donald Trump Is Weirdly Full of Praise for the Taliban

In April 2020, as the coronavirus was engulfing the U.S., then president Donald Trump declared at his then daily coronavirus briefing, “This is a very brilliant enemy. You know, it’s a brilliant enemy. They develop drugs like the antibiotics. You see it. Antibiotics used to solve every problem. Now one of the biggest problems the world has is the germ has gotten so brilliant that the antibiotic can’t keep up with it. And they’re constantly trying to come up with a new—people go to a hospital and they catch—they go for a heart operation—that’s no problem, but they end up dying from, from problems. You know the problems I’m talking about. There’s a whole genius to it.” The remarks were bizarre not just because, as the name suggests, the coronavirus is not a bacterial infection but a virus, and therefore immune to antibiotics, but because Trump was describing a disease that had by then killed more than 20,000 people in the U.S. in the sort of glowing terms he typically only reserved for himself. Brilliant! Genius! Sure, it was highly contagious and extremely lethal but damn if Trump didn’t admire it for those very reasons because, as you’d probably figured out by that point, there is something very wrong with him.

Anyway, we were reminded of the ex-president’s high regard of COVID-19 on Tuesday night when he appeared on Fox News to talk about how great the Taliban is.

Per Insider:

Former President Donald Trump praised the Taliban on Tuesday, calling the group “smart” and “good fighters.”

“The Taliban, good fighters, I will tell you, good fighters. You have to give them credit for that. They’ve been fighting for a thousand years. What they do is they fight,” Trump said on Fox News’ [Hannity] on August 17. “The Taliban has circled the airport, and who knows if they’re going to treat us right? All of a sudden, they’ll say—well, frankly, if they were smart, they’d really—and they are smart. They are smart. They should let the Americans out,” Trump said to Hannity.

The Taliban, of course, have not been fighting for 1,000 years, as the organization was founded in the early 1990s, though that’s the least problematic thing that came out of Trump‘s mouth during the interview.

Composed of fighters called the mujahideen, the group took control of the capital, Kabul, in 1996, but it lost power in 2001 after American forces invaded. Trump’s praise of the Taliban is alarming, considering that the group is known for its brutal, violent tactics. Just this year, the militant group beheaded an Afghan interpreter for the U.S. Army. The Taliban has also been accused of multiple bombings and assassinations. Afghan women are also fearful that they may be barred from working, stoned for breaking the rules, or even killed if the Taliban imposes its strict form of Sharia.

Elsewhere in Trump’s chat with Hannity, the former president attempted to rewrite his own Afghanistan history, as he is wont to do. Claiming he “never had a lot of confidence, frankly” in Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who fled the country for the UAE, Trump insisted that he believed Ghani “was a total crook” who he “never liked.” Which differs slightly from his previous comments about the guy:

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a Trump hit without him going off on a bizarre tangent about how dictators the world over love him and think Joe Biden sucks:

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