Where will Nigel Farage and Reform UK position themselves now? Will they condemn him or finally accept that they are traitors and only seek to be Trump’s poodles?
Trump’s so-called Board of Peace resembles the bar scene in Star Wars.
His attempts at appeasing MAGA have gone down like a cholera epidemic in the rest of the world.
Donald Trump has crossed a line and not for the first time, but this time the target is unmistakable: the soldiers who fought and died alongside American forces in Afghanistan.
Fresh from the wreckage he left behind at Davos, where alliances were strained and diplomatic trust further eroded, the American president has now compounded the damage with a lie so crude, so lazy, and so offensive that it should shame even him.
To suggest that coalition forces in Afghanistan “stayed a little back; a little off the frontlines” is not merely inaccurate. It is a slur on the service of allied troops—British, Danish, Canadian, Australian and many more who fought, bled and died in one of the most brutal wars of the modern era.
This will echo far beyond abstract arguments about geopolitics. It lands directly on the families of the dead.
Trump’s words are a gut punch to the families of the 1,160 non-American coalition soldiers killed in Afghanistan.
They are a gut punch to the thousands more who were wounded, many of them catastrophically and who will carry those injuries for the rest of their lives.
And they are a gut punch to the soldiers who stood on the same frontlines as American troops and who will never escape the memories of what they saw and did there.
Afghanistan was America’s war. After 9/11, America asked for help and its allies answered. They stayed for more than two decades, long after the mission lost clarity, long after the war became unwinnable, and long after the costs became unbearable.
They did not “hang back”. They went forward.
The lie collapses on contact with reality
I was in Helmand Province in 2007, embedded with British and Danish troops. They were not lurking behind the wire. They were fighting, daily, against an enemy that controlled towns, roads and fields.
The Danes suffered the highest per-capita casualties of any NATO nation in Afghanistan. British troops fought ferocious battles in Sangin, Musa Qala, Babaji and Nad Ali, names that still tighten throats and quicken pulses among those who were there.
In Britain, the war carved a scar across the national consciousness: Union flag-draped coffins moving slowly through Wootton Bassett, week after week, month after month. A ritual of grief that required no commentary.
In total, 457 British service men and women were killed in Afghanistan.
They did not die “a little off the frontlines”.
A draft dodger passing judgement on the dead
And it is here that Trump’s words curdle from ignorance into obscenity.
Donald Trump dodged the Vietnam War draft five times.
According to The New York Times, four deferments were granted so he could remain in college. A fifth was secured through a diagnosis of bone spurs, a condition that has never stopped him playing sport, travelling incessantly, or posturing as a strongman ever since.
This is a man who never served, never fought, and never risked his life, now sneering at those who did.
Trump’s contempt is not accidental. It is consistent. Prisoners of war, the wounded, the fallen; again and again he shows the same instinctive disdain for sacrifice he has never had to make himself.
For the families who lost sons and daughters, husbands and wives, and brothers and sisters, this is not political theatre. It is a desecration.
And for the soldiers who stood shoulder to shoulder with American forces, Trump’s words are a reminder of an ugly truth: some men will always mistake their own absence from danger for superiority and will happily insult the dead to protect their ego.
This time, he has disgraced not just himself, but the office he holds.
