Trump's Confusing Debate Comment About 'Abdul' Has A Strange, Shifting Backstory

During a strange moment in Tuesday’s presidential debate, Donald Trump made a passing reference to “Abdul” — no last name — and said that as president, he sent a picture of Abdul’s own house to him as a threat.

But this is Donald Trump, so of course, there’s a strange history to the claim. The story has changed over the years, from an offhand comment to a viral claim about threatening a Taliban leader with a satellite photo.

The “Abdul” in question is Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Baradar, a Taliban official and co-founder of the movement that now controls Afghanistan, was the United States’ negotiating partner when the Trump administration — led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad — agreed to a February 2020 deal to withdraw from the country. The deal, known as the Doha Agreement, has been criticized for not containing enforcement mechanisms to hold the Taliban accountable to its terms.

Baradar was languishing in a Pakistani jail before 2018 — when the United States and “high-level negotiations” were credited with his release. Contrary to Trump’s claim, he’s never been the “head” of the Taliban.

Trump failed to completely withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan during his presidency, but his successor Joe Biden did. The withdrawal was infamously marked by a lone ISIS-K suicide bomber who killed 13 American service members and roughly 170 Afghans at Hamid Karzai International Airport on Aug. 26, 2021.

During Trump’s presidency, 45 American combat deaths were reported in Afghanistan. In the 18-month period between the signing of the Doha Agreement and the airport suicide bombing, no U.S. service members were killed in combat in Afghanistan. Trump has falsely implied this whole stretch occurred during his presidency; seven months were during Biden’s tenure.

Trump’s ever-shifting story concerns a conversation he had with Baradar, the Taliban leader. During Tuesday’s debate, Trump claimed that he warned Baradar that Taliban militants should stop killing Americans — by threatening him.

“I told Abdul, ‘Don’t do it anymore, you do it anymore, you’re gonna have problems,’” Trump said. “And he said, ‘Why do you send me a picture of my house?’ I said, ‘You’re going to have to figure that out, Abdul.’ And for 18 months, we had nobody killed.”

Both the Taliban and U.S. government did in fact acknowledge a call between the two in the days after the signing of the Doha Agreement. Trump has claimed that he’s spoken to Baradar “numerous” times, but, at least officially, only one such conversation took place.

Several members of both governments listened in on the conversation — and neither side mentioned Trump threatening Baradar.

Over the years, Trump’s assertion that he muscled the Taliban leader has grown more and more curious.

The claim first bubbled up in 2021. During a July speech, Trump recounted a conversation with a Taliban leader — “let’s call him Mohammed” — who Trump characterized as speaking entirely in grunts. The former president recalled threatening “your village, where I know you are,” in a call with the leader. “That’s going to be the point at which the first bombs drop.”

The following month, Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity that in a conversation with Baradar, “I said, ‘Look, before we start, let me just tell you right now that if anything bad happens to Americans or anybody else, or if you ever come over to our land, we will hit you with a force that no country has ever been hit with before [...] And your village, and we know where it is’ – and I named it – ‘will be the first one. The first bombs will be dropped right there.’”

He said something similar to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt a few days later, saying his threat to Baradar to “hit you harder than anybody has ever been hit in world history” started with Baradar’s town.

“I believe I repeated the name of his town,” Trump told Hewitt. “‘That will be the first place that we start. And I won’t be able to speak to you anymore after that, and isn’t that a very sad thing?’ But that is the story.”

After the August 2021 suicide bombing that killed American troops, “the story” started to change, growing more and more aggressive on Trump’s part.

In September 2022, Hannity interviewed Trump again, and asked about the Baradar story.

“Didn’t you at one point tell him, ‘I know exactly where you are,’ and give him the exact coordinates where he was?”

At that point, Trump changed his story. “No, I sent him a picture of his house,” the former president claimed. “He said, ‘But why, but why, do you send me a picture of my house?’ I said, ‘You’ll have to figure that out.’”

That version of the story is most similar to the one Trump told Tuesday — but significantly different than the first version of his claim. It’s also different from other people’s claims of the exchange, to the extent there was one at all.

In July, for example, Trump ally Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas) went viral with his claim that Trump was present in person, alongside Pompeo, during a discussion with “a Taliban leader.” Hunt claimed Trump threatened to “kill” the leader “if you harm a hair on a single American.”

Then, according to Hunt, “He reached in his pocket, pulled out a satellite photo of the leader of the Taliban’s home, and handed it to him, got up, and walked out of the room.” (There’s no evidence Trump was ever in the same room as a Taliban leader; his phone call with Baradar was described at the time as the first known conversation between a U.S. president and the Taliban.)

Then there’s Pompeo, who’s told slightly different versions of the story himself.

On Fox News in August 2021, the former secretary of state claimed he was “in the room when President Trump made very clear to Mullah Baradar, the senior Taliban negotiator, that if you threatened an American — if you scared an American, certainly if you hurt an American — that we would bring all American power to bear to make sure that we went to your village, to your house.”

A few days later, during remarks to the Kansas Independent Oil & Gas Association, Pompeo said he was the one who showed Baradar a satellite image of his home. He recounted the phone call between Trump and the Taliban, then separately discussed the supposed photo of Baradar’s home.

“The Taliban understood that if you touched an American, let alone killed an American — indeed, as we had phrased it, if you scare an American — that there’ll be real costs,” he said. “‘We will come to find you,’ which was a lot of fun, sitting there with Mullah Baradar, to remind him that I knew exactly where his house was — I showed him the photo — that we knew where his friends were, we knew where his village was, and we were going to hold those responsible for that American accountable.”

Afghan officials did not return HuffPost’s requests for comment about Trump’s claims. Nor did the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon, Trump’s campaign, Hunt’s spokesperson or Pompeo’s political action committee.