don, when you talk about his mental health, i think that was on display in this livestream. i watched almost everything he posted on facebook today. it was actually on facebook for a significant amount of time given the rhetoric and the danger that it posed. we don t want to show you too much of it because we don t want to give it too much credence. a lot of what he had to say didn t make a whole heck of a lot of sense, but here s just a small sample. you shoot me, two and a half blocks are going with me. and then you re talking about a revolution. the revolution is on. it s here. it s today. reporter: and what he said there kind of crystallizes why it had police so concerned. there was so much politically charged rhetoric of what he had to say in that livestream. he demanded president joe biden to step down. cnn actually spoke with his son after this incident was all
those were the worst kind of images that a commander in chief would want the american people to see on his watch. it is the most crucial part of the challenge in front of him, that is managing that evacuation over the next several weeks to try to get those people out safely. we so far have not seen american casualties, we ve not seen widespread loss of life, so this is a recoverable situation in a practical sense on the ground. but foreign affairs are not at the top of americans agenda politically. the views are very susceptible to events. even if you had a smoothly managed withdrawal, if you had a subsequent terrorist incident and arguments from political opponents that the departure from afghanistan had led to a resurgence of terrorism from afghanistan, he would be vulnerable to that. this is something that i think president biden decided based on the belief that he s held for a
wanted to have happen, god knows, but i think they re in the position now of saying, okay, we ve said this war is one that has to end. it has to end partly because we have not established the institutions and the culture there that were going to create ultimately a positive world for the united states. we now know that in vivid detail. but in order for the united states to leave there with sos some measure of honor, use your skill set at the top and use it properly to get people home and out of the country. is this part of the political calculation, knowing that by and large america is with him and they won t hold the aftermath against him? americans have supported in polls getting out of afghanistan, longest war in american history, 20 years. but those views are pretty lightly held. there was never going to be a big political payoff for joe biden in this, and now there s certainly not going to be. obviously, as evan indicated.
full legacy of america s experience in this period. in a big way, perhaps this president s legacy, you mentioned what he said to bill clinton and his experience as a senator and vice president. one of his selling points, evan, was his experience. we were told his administration would be the full grown-ups with foreign policy experience and the expertise to fix things. not krcronies like his predecessor. is this a blow to that image or remains to be seen? part of it will be about how much are they able to speak candidly about what went wrong, what are the lessons learned, and how do you go forward? because they do have experience. i think part of this is joe biden has been pretty clear for 20 years about how he thought about the war in afghanistan, his concerns about it. in some strange way the chaos of the last few days, as he indicated in an interview yesterday were, to his mind, in some ways inevitable. they didn t have to be as bad as it was. this is not something that anybody i
government would crumble so fast. i think from president biden s point of view, he had bad options of the one is if he acted in an accelerated manner to have a mass evacuation, he risked undermining confidence in the government and accelerating the collapse of the government. the same with some of his statements that he made about expressing optimism that the taliban would not take over. had he hinted that he thought the taliban was going to rapidly take over, that also would have undercut confidence in the government. he could have sent in more troops, of course, to stabilize the situation, but that s going precisely in the wrong direction of the policy that he wanted to pursue. so what he did was try to go along with the troop levels that he had. they did try to speed up the visas for the interpreters, but obviously not fast enough and the government collapsed, and that is the source of most of the disorder and challenge that we face now. it s a tough situation.