Desperate Donald Trump puts his few remaining chips down on Afghanistan gambit
As poker analogies go, Donald Trump is nearly out of chips. His approval rating is historically low. His political capital is zero. Most of his advisers are gone. He has no remaining agenda. His own party is now publicly distancing itself from him. His weird gambit with North Korea didn’t work. Mainstream America thinks he’s a racist. Tens of thousands of people are protesting against him and his shrinking base. And now he’s decided where he’s putting his few remaining chips.
Trump will be addressing the nation on national television on Monday night, the first time he’s ever done so. His speech will be focused on Afghanistan. It’s long been expected that his last political gasps would be war related, and now we’ve arrived. It’s still not entirely clear just what Trump is planning to do about Afghanistan, but there are a few options.
He could try announcing that he’s withdrawing entirely, so he can call the sixteen year war a victory and take credit for winning it. But it’s difficult to imagine who would buy into such a claim, as Americans are well aware that Afghanistan is an ongoing stalemate. But NBC News thinks Trump will instead announce a troop increase in Afghanistan (link). He may be banking on scaring moderate Americans into believing that terrorists in Afghanistan will attack the U.S. any minute if he doesn’t send more troops to the region. But it’s not a given that Americans would buy into such a gambit.
Donald Trump’s last gambit to boost his approval rating involved publicly threatening to go to nuclear war with North Korea. He seemed to think that doing so would scare Americans into supporting him amid the threat of war. But instead Americans were scared by Trump’s own apocalyptic rhetoric, and after a few days of getting nowhere, Trump abandoned the entire war of words. If his Afghanistan proposal is also just a publicity ploy, it could end up quickly backfiring as well.
