How Trump softened up the GOP for President Biden

But arguably on no issue has Trump paved the way for Biden to get something popular done as much as on Afghanistan.

For much of the two decades that the United States has waged war there and elsewhere in the Middle East, Republicans were the more hawkish party, while Democrats were more noninterventionist and isolationist. Trump turned that on its head, pushing for withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq throughout his 2016 campaign and finding the GOP increasingly receptive to that message. He even withdrew from northern Syria against the advice of many of his party’s leaders in late 2019.

The result: By the end of his presidency, Republican voters were more anxious to get out of Afghanistan than their Democratic counterparts. A March 2020 YouGov poll showed 67 percent of Republicans supported a deal negotiated with the Taliban to withdraw from Afghanistan, versus 32 percent of Democrats. (Much of the difference was accounted for by people unfamiliar with the details and/or unsure of their support for it.) You could perhaps chalk that up to the Trump administration forging the deal and Democrats not trusting the then-president, but even before the deal was struck, a 2019 AP-NORC poll showed 56 percent of Republicans wanted to withdraw most troops from Afghanistan, compared to 30 percent of Democrats.

At the time, though, such a withdrawal was more prospective. Trump eventually planned a May 1, 2021, withdrawal, but then, when he lost the election, that date fell to his successor to deal with.

Fast-forward to April 2021, and Biden seems to have united the two parties behind a firmer and more definite withdrawal. Biden has instead said all troops will be out by the later date of Sept. 11, but the withdrawal is not subject to conditions on the ground. In other words, it’s going to happen barring a major flip-flop.

Another YouGov poll released last week showed that 58 percent of U.S. adults supported that Sept. 11 withdrawal date, including 74 percent of Democrats and 45 percent of Republicans. That poll suggested partisanship is indeed at play, as it often is, with Democrats trusting the plans of a Democratic president and Republicans losing faith in the process in light of the same fact.

But another YouGov poll conducted slightly later takes some of the partisanship out of it — and suggests this is an even more overwhelmingly popular decision. The new YouGov poll, for CBS News, asked more broadly about whether people support a withdrawal. Fully 77 percent were in favor, while just 23 percent opposed. The numbers in favor include 89 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans.

Getting three-fourths of Americans to agree on much of anything these days is a huge feat. It’s possible we might have gotten somewhere close even without a Republican president pushing for withdrawal from the region for four-plus years, given the amount of war-weariness that exists after nearly two decades. But it’s also true that Biden is again poised to do something Trump tried to get done during his time in office and wasn’t able to, while priming much of his party to be in favor of it.