President Joe Biden may not have the time of day to give to families who lost loved ones in the botched withdrawal of Afghanistan — but count on GOP front-runner Donald Trump to pay them the attention and respect they’re due.
According to Breitbart, the former president and GOP Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida were scheduled to meet with some of the Gold Star families who lost loved ones in the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
The meeting at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club was scheduled one day after some of the families testified before a roundtable hosted by the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington, D.C. — and on the second anniversary of the last American plane to leave Afghanistan.
At the Tuesday hearing, according to NBC News, families expressed their disappointment with President Joe Biden’s administration for the botched withdrawal, including the Kabul airport bombing that claimed the lives of 13 U.S. troops.
“Our so-called leader can’t even utter their names in public — not even once,” said Mark Schmitz, father of Marine Lance Cpl. Jared Schmitz, who died in the bombing.
“Mr. Biden has run his entire political campaign for 50 years as a family man … That campaign slogan will never work again. We have been seeing what is going on in your family — and even worse, we’ve seen how you have been treating us, the Gold Star families.
“There cannot be anything more cowardly and disgusting with how you treated us,” he continued. “You are a disgrace to the nation.”
“Our so-called leader can’t seem to even utter their names in public — not even once,” says the Gold Star dad to fallen Marine Lance Cpl. Jared Schmitz.
“There couldn’t be anything more disgusting and cowardly than the way you have treated us. You are a disgrace to this nation.” pic.twitter.com/UxttDHMt7P
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 29, 2023
Jaclyn Schmitz, Jared Schmitz’ stepmother, read the names of the 13 troops who died in the bombing and said they were “not just casualties of war,” NBC reported.
“They are sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, that were pawns in some agenda, and we deserve some information and collaboration from all political parties,” she said.
Greg Page, the father of Marine Cpl. Daegan W. Page, said that the administration’s duplicity was what irked him.
“We’ve been lied to about what happened that day, as well as what happened to our children. We’ve been lied to about our relationship with the Taliban, which, by the way, have done more to take out the leaders of this attack than our own leadership has,” Page said.
Biden, obviously, wasn’t going to be meeting with the Gold Star families now — and when he did so in 2021, reports indicated he made the interaction about himself. One family alleged the president asserted, erroneously, that his son Beau had died in combat.
Trump and Waltz aimed to fix that, according to the Florida congressman.
“I’ve been obviously dealing with Gold Star families and keeping in touch with them — I sadly have a lot of experience with Gold Star families from the Green Berets and others that have been lost over time,” Waltz said, Breitbart reported.
“What has been so striking to me is obviously there is a level of grief there, to lose a child is just hard to imagine, but I’ve never in 20 years of dealing with the Gold Star community, I’ve never come across a group that’s so angry.”
Meanwhile, a Trump campaign official confirmed the event and touted the former president’s commitment to those who lost loved ones in Afghanistan.
“There is no bigger champion of America’s military members, and their families as well, than President Trump,” the official told Breitbart.
“Contrast that with Joe Biden’s total lack of respect for our military and his disastrous and embarrassing withdrawal in Afghanistan that led to the death of American troops, put additional lives at risk, and emboldened the enemy.”
Whether or not that contrast shows up in the polls is another issue entirely; thanks to numerous other crises on the national and global stage, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan has been mostly forgotten by the media.
However, the two-year anniversary of the fall of Kabul — including the bombing which claimed the lives of those 13 troops and 170 Afghanis — reminds us all of just who Joe Biden is. Mark Schmitz, in his testimony Tuesday, may have best summed up the affect it had on him: “I identify as a father, a husband, a pissed-off, fed-up American patriot and now, thanks to this administration, a Gold Star dad — a title no one ever wants to have,” NBC reported.
It was Joe Biden who took Donald Trump’s conditional withdrawal plan and made it unconditional. The blood is on his hands — and if he’s not going to answer to the families affected by his disastrous decision-making, some presidential candidate needs to. After all, these Gold Star families can’t forget. Maybe this time, America won’t, either.
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