WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump said during a post-presidency interview with an author that he had to deal with an Afghanistan-related issue, even though he no longer had foreign policy powers, according to audio shared exclusively with NBC News.
“The reason I’m doing this and devoting a lot of time to it, I have to get back up, because I’m doing the whole thing with the Afghanistan,” Trump told author Ramin Setoodeh in a post-presidency interview. “Has he blown that Afghanistan?”
Setoodeh, who wrote the new book “Apprentice in Wonderland,” has previously described the Afghanistan conversation with Trump, saying in an interview with CNN that Trump “seemed to think that he still had some foreign policy powers.”
But President Joe Biden had prohibited Trump from receiving intelligence briefings that are typically provided to former presidents.
Reached for clarification about Trump’s Afghanistan comments, Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung criticized Biden’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal as “botched” and pointed to the deaths of 13 service members.
“That’s on Biden and he will never be able to live that down,” Cheung said in a statement.
He did not address why Trump discussed handling a foreign policy matter when he no longer held those powers.
In an MSNBC interview Thursday, Setoodeh threw doubt on Trump’s memory, saying his recall of his reality TV show “The Apprentice” was “much clearer than his memory of what he did in the White House.”
“He stumbled with the chronology of recent events,” Setoodeh said. “He stumbled in terms of what had happened in terms of our interviews. When we spoke back to back to back, he couldn’t really remember talking to me between our first and second conversations.”
Trump’s “short-term memory was not clear,” Setoodeh added. “It was very foggy, and he had issues remembering things.”
Biden and Trump are the oldest presidents in American history. Biden, 81, and Trump, 78, have each worked to paint the other as mentally unfit for office.
In his statement to NBC News, Cheung attacked Setoodeh’s characterization of Trump’s memory.
Cheung criticized Setoodeh as having “chosen to allow Trump Derangement Syndrome to rot his brain like so many other losers whose entire existence revolves around President Trump.”
Polling indicates that voters are concerned about what the candidates’ ages might mean for their ability to hold office. Voters appear to consider the issue more of a liability for Biden than for Trump, according to polling.
Jesse Rodriguez contributed.
