As President Trump was railing against the news media in Phoenix on Tuesday night, The Daily Show's Trevor Noah was looking back at a very different and much more consequential speech Trump had given the night before, laying out his plans for the Afghanistan War. "It was a good speech, and he successfully read it," Noah shrugged. But it had a pretty murky definition of "victory," and was very light on the details. "While we do know that Trump has decided to send more troops to Afghanistan, that's pretty much all we know," he said. "Trump's actual strategy is like his position on Nazis — it's unclear."
Most of Trump's speech featured Teleprompter-reading "book-report Trump," Noah said, but there were glimpses of "freestyle Trump," and he tried to imagine former President Barack Obama throwing in a catchphrase while escalating a war. And even the scripted parts had some surprising assertions, like that Trump is a "problem solver," for example. "Yeah, Trump is a problem solver the same way Godzilla is a city planner," Noah said. "The only way Donald Trump could consider himself a problem solver is if he stops creating problems."
But jokes aside (for a minute), Noah was impressed that the former generals around Trump had convinced him to go against his instincts (and campaign pledges) to pull out of Afghanistan, and also with the "genius" tactics they used, heavy on the visual aids. "I mean, Trump may not care about bringing democracy to Afghanistan, but bringing miniskirts, that's a different story," he joked. Still, now that Trump has decided to send in more troops, Noah wasn't sure what the end goal is, and to highlight how much Trump's new strategy is really just the old strategy, he juxtaposed key parts of Trump's speech with eerily similar Afghanistan War statements by Obama. Watch and wonder below. Peter Weber
The Week
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