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00:00 White House doing damage control after getting called out by Gold Star families over the
00:04 botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
00:06 The president called it a success, but family members of the 13 American service members
00:11 killed say he is lying.
00:14 Do what our son did.
00:17 Be a grown ass man.
00:20 Admit your mistakes.
00:23 Learn from them so that this doesn't happen ever, ever again.
00:29 Call this evacuation a success as if there should be celebration.
00:37 It is like a knife in the heart.
00:39 What kind of disrespect?
00:40 What kind of hatred?
00:43 We were told lies, given incomplete reports, incorrect reports.
00:51 Total disrespect.
00:53 Those parents are very upset, but the administration is not offering up an apology.
00:57 Biden also getting slammed by a Gold Star mom for having this tone deaf reaction.
01:02 When Joe Biden, our elected president, entered the room, when he approached me, his words
01:09 to me were, my wife, Jill, and I know how you feel.
01:13 We lost our son as well and brought him home in a five draped coffin.
01:19 My heart started beating faster and I started shaking knowing that their son died from cancer
01:23 and they were able to be by his side.
01:26 So Jesse, I'm just thinking of the last topic where in today's world people are expected
01:31 to apologize over views on heterosexuality, but there's no apology for one of the worst
01:39 military disasters, at least in my lifetime, and they're calling it a success.
01:43 So this is what politicians are supposed to be good at.
01:46 Right.
01:47 You're a politician because you're supposed to cry with a mom.
01:52 And it's not like the Iraq war or World War I or II where, you know, you have an amazing
01:57 amount of people dead on your doorstep.
02:00 These are 13 service members.
02:03 Okay.
02:04 Not a lot of people.
02:05 So what you do as the president is that you cherish these families and you nurture this
02:11 relationship.
02:12 And I'm talking letters, phone calls, events.
02:16 You call them on Thanksgiving, you check in with them, you invite them to the White House
02:20 and it's a year long relationship that you now have with these 13 families.
02:26 How do I know that?
02:27 You know, people don't think Jesse waters is humanity.
02:31 No.
02:32 Okay.
02:33 It's the last thing we think about.
02:34 This is an elemental aspect of the human condition.
02:37 These people died on your watch because of a mistake that your administration made is
02:43 the least you could do is create some sort of bond with these families.
02:51 So these families now feel like their, their, their sons and daughters weren't worthless.
02:57 This guy checked his watch when the coffins were coming home on the tarmac.
03:01 This guy has never really owned up to this mistake.
03:04 I hate using this analogy, but if this had happened under the Trump administration, you
03:10 would have seen every single one of these gold star family members on every single show,
03:15 every single Sunday until the election.
03:18 That's just the way it is.
03:19 But these families have been ignored because it doesn't fit the narrative and it's a shame.
03:24 And I'm sorry on the president's behalf, but I don't, I'm sorry.
03:27 Go ahead.
03:28 I just, I don't think that's actually true.
03:29 And I'll tell you why, because I don't think president Trump would have ducked it.
03:33 Right.
03:34 Okay.
03:35 So you, the, the, the Biden people wouldn't have been able to use it against president
03:38 Trump because he would have owned up to it.
03:41 Right.
03:42 He would have held them close.
03:43 He would have done all the things that you're talking about.
03:44 Make sure their children have scholarships, make sure they have opportunity, take them
03:48 to want to ride on air force one, like whatever it might be, they would have had the relationships
03:52 with that would have happened because empathy is a choice.
03:55 Biden made one, right?
03:56 But what Biden decided to do here was to blame the Trump administration.
04:00 Yeah, that was a, they kept saying is that, well, they left us a mess.
04:03 And that is, that is patently untrue.
04:05 There's, and there's so many moral injuries right now with the veterans who tried to help
04:09 so many of the Afghans who had helped them, who spent their life savings, every contact
04:15 they had, they traveled through Kazakhstan in order to get there in order to help save
04:19 these guys for the ones that were able to get here.
04:22 They're now waiting for the state department to get their act together so that they can
04:26 have permanent status so that they can at least start their lives and begin here.
04:30 The backlogs is like 80,000 strong.
04:32 So one thing that if the Biden administration really wanted to try to do something about
04:36 this, it could try to fix that.
04:37 But there's really no indication, unfortunately, that was being near this anniversary that
04:41 that's happening.
04:42 Yeah.
04:43 You know, Harold, we were sold in 2020 that Joe was good.
04:46 Was this guy who could was put a human face on, on, on and, and, and express this empathy.
04:53 But the smiles, the handshakes, the hugs, all of this stuff just comes off as phony
05:00 as anything, because it's always infused with this weird falsehood and this confusion of
05:05 facts.
05:06 What do you make of this?
05:07 Why can't he do this?
05:09 Well, I think a couple of things.
05:11 First, after the Bay of Pigs, I thought President Kennedy summed it up well, because most presidents
05:16 never take responsibility for for failures.
05:19 He said that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.
05:24 And I've never seen a president come forward and take full responsibility for anything
05:28 that that's gone wrong.
05:30 I feel for these these gold star families that the pain that that father asking the
05:36 president to own up to it.
05:39 It takes a lot for anyone to say that to the president that had said certainly an everyday
05:44 American citizen who happens to be the father of someone who gave their life for the country.
05:51 This President Biden had blame.
05:52 Absolutely.
05:53 Is he solely to blame for 20 year war?
05:56 No.
05:57 But he's president now.
05:59 And I think to your point, Jesse, there probably was a lot that could have been done over the
06:04 last year or so to not only cultivate a relationship, but to express what we what we would do better
06:12 in a situation.
06:14 I think when you are inclined to just blame your predecessor in politics, you're not living
06:20 up to everything you should be living up to in any office.
06:23 This is not directed in any any any personal way towards President Biden.
06:26 But the way to really to deal with this is to lay out the plan.
06:30 So we know this will never happen again, wherever we might be.
06:33 And if you need to blame President Trump and others, go right ahead and do that.
06:36 But lay out what we did wrong and what could be done better as we think about this going
06:41 forward.
06:42 For that to happen, though, Katie, you should have some kind of media that cares about this
06:48 so it doesn't happen again.
06:50 Again, what Jess said is true.
06:52 It's like if it was Trump, you'd be having reassessments and assessments and hearing
06:57 after hearing, after hearing.
06:59 And in this case, it's always when there's something bad that happens under a Democratic
07:02 president.
07:03 It's one and done.
07:04 Well, there's so many consequences to what has happened here.
07:07 And the Biden administration went out of their way to sell this as a success.
07:11 They tried to make it a good PR move to say it was not just a success, but the most successful
07:15 airlift in American history.
07:17 But we're all watching what was unfolding.
07:19 And then these 13 service members were killed.
07:22 Now we're seeing that from the parents and testimony that they took the SIM cards away.
07:26 And when John Kirby said that from my perch, it wasn't chaotic.
07:30 Right.
07:31 Well, I guarantee you those SIM cards from the phones, the people who died showed a very
07:34 different story than what he said and the narrative that the White House has been trying
07:38 to push.
07:39 And they haven't recovered from this.
07:40 This is something that made President Biden's poll numbers go down.
07:43 He hasn't recovered from it.
07:44 And the thing that is really just horrible that Biden just keeps doing is he keeps equating
07:51 Beau Biden's death from cancer, which is horrible, awful.
07:55 A lot of us know people who have died from cancer, but he equates that to being killed
07:59 in combat, to grieving parents who have just had their children killed in combat.
08:05 And quite frankly, it's like a stolen valor.
08:07 I mean, you're implying that he was killed in combat when he wasn't.
08:10 And he's done this to a number of parents.
08:12 It didn't just happen once.
08:13 It's happened to at least three sets of them.
08:15 And so they tried to sell this as a success.
08:17 It isn't.
08:18 But for the morale of the military, which we continue to hear a lot about with the Pentagon
08:21 because they can't recruit anybody.
08:23 This of course was a huge moment for them.
08:25 And when I was in Normandy in June, I sat across the table for dinner with an Army Ranger
08:30 and I was just asking him about his career.
08:32 And he told me he served 12 tours in Afghanistan.
08:36 And immediately I knew what that meant.
08:38 And he was completely broken.
08:40 And this does not help at all.
08:42 And for them to say it's a success, and to continue with that line when clearly it wasn't,
08:47 does not help the country when it comes to military readiness.
09:01 [BLANK_AUDIO]