A fact check has thrown cold water on a key claim made in Donald Trump’s now-infamous TikTok with Gold Star families at Arlington National Cemetery.
Trump patted himself on the back in the clip, claiming there was an 18-month period in his presidency where not a single U.S. troop was fatally attacked in Afghanistan.
“We didn’t lose one person in 18 months,” he says in a voiceover, which was seemingly ripped from an old TV interview. “And then they took over that disaster.”
There was indeed a year-and-a-half stretch where U.S. service members were free of fatalities in Afghanistan, reported The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, a fact checker who’s long been a thorn in Trump’s side. But that period overlapped between both Trump and Biden’s presidencies.
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Donald Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery alongside the loved ones of those who were killed in Afghanistan in 2021.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
That stretch included the last 11 months in Trump’s presidency—including the post-election period where he largely spent his days lying about mass voter fraud—and the first seven months of Biden’s time in the Oval Office.
The Post reported that it reviewed every other potential 18-month period during Trump’s presidency and found none that would make Trump’s claim true. Trump had in fact attended the repatriation ceremony for the two soldiers killed in action in Afghanistan in February 2020, which began an 18-month stretch without deaths. He saluted the coffins of posthumously promoted Army Sgts. 1st Class Javier Jaguar Gutierrez and Antonio Rey Rodriguez, both members of the 7th Special Forces Battalion, who were killed by a member of the Afghan National Army in an insider attack in February 2020.
Being president of the ceremony has not stopped the former president from repeatedly claiming credit for the fatality-free period in its entirety, however.
“We had no soldiers killed for 18 months while I was there because they knew—don’t play around with our soldiers,” Trump said in North Carolina on Aug. 21.
Just four days earlier, Trump had made a similar claim at a Pennsylvania rally.
“For 18 months, we didn’t have one American soldier killed in Afghanistan,” he said. “And then I left—and then I left—and there’s a bunch of incompetent people took over and it all started up again.”
Kessler, who doles out “Pinocchios” on his fact checks based on how egregious a lie is, gave Trump’s false claims about troop deaths a two on the Pinocchio scale out of a possible four.
Glenn Kessler determined Donald Trump’s lie about their being no U.S. soldiers killed in an 18-month period of his presidency as being worthy of two Pinocchios.
The Washington Post
Scrutiny over Trump and the military went into overdrive late last month after he was accused of politicizing a visit to Arlington—the largest resting place for U.S. veterans and soldiers killed in action.
Criticisms from the Aug. 26 visit began immediately as photos emerged of Trump smiling and giving a thumbs up while posing with gold star families next to their fallen loved ones’ graves. Others in the photos also flashed a smile and Trump’s signature hand gesture, but Trump was still slammed by some prominent veterans for his cemetery decorum.
Trump’s headache over the incident grew further that night after he posted the politicized TikTok from his visit where he took a subtle dig at the current administration.
Trump’s visit to Arlington reached full-on scandal by Tuesday. That’s when a report alleged someone in Trump’s posse physically assaulted a cemetery employee who tried to stop a photographer from filming inside Section 60 of the cemetery, a 14-acre area where U.S. service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are laid to rest.
Only cemetery staff members are authorized to take photographs or film in the area, but Trump’s campaign has insisted they received approval to have cameras there. The campaign initially insisted that nobody in the group got physical with the employee, but the U.S. Army confirmed in a statement that a Trump staffer did push a woman who confronted the group.
Trump’s team has fired back by pinning the deaths of 13 U.S. troops during the chaotic evacuation of Afghanistan in 2021 solely on Biden. The tragedy took place in Biden’s first months in office, but the plan to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan had been orchestrated by Trump the year prior.
Trump even boasted about his work to strike a deal over the phone with the Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar and celebrated Biden’s decision to see his plan through.
“Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do,” Trump said in a written statement after Biden announced the withdrawal was still on. “I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible.”
Trump bragged on June 26 of that year—less than two months before the Taliban took over—that he had made it difficult for Biden to change course, trying to claim full credit for the decision.
“I started the process. All the troops are coming back home. They couldn’t stop the process,” Trump said, referencing the Biden administration. “They couldn’t stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process.”
Now, Trump’s campaign has done everything it can to distance him from the decision and has used the deaths of 13 U.S. soldiers—killed by a suicide bomber at the Kabul airport—as an attack point on Kamala Harris and Biden.
