CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The President of Peace Makes War on the Planet

Image by Javier Miranda.

Hey, I always suspected that Donald Trump and I, having both grown up in New York City in the 1950s and early 1960s, had something in common. Now, I know just what it is — his boyhood love for the 1950s TV program Victory at Sea. (“Did you ever see ‘Victory at Sea?’ ” he asked reporters in January while talking about the new “Trump class” battleships he wants to build. “What a great thing that is to watch!”) I was similarly fascinated by that prime-time documentary series on World War II when I was a youngster, and I imagine that the two of us were watching it at the very same time in the very same city, both of us possibly with our fathers, on what were undoubtedly black-and-white TVs. Of course, his father built barracks and garden apartments for the Navy during World War II, while my father, at age 35 and unlikely to be drafted, volunteered for the military the day after Pearl Harbor and ended up a major in the U.S. Air Force fighting the Japanese in Burma. (He seemed to have made it back just in time for my birth in July 1944.)

Oh, and there was another difference between us, come to think of it. Only one of us, possibly inspired by that very TV show, has the power to order that a fleet of new battleships — a “golden fleet,” no less (“They’ll be the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built”), including one to be named the USS Defiant — be constructed to fulfill his childhood war-making fantasies. And only one of us has the power as well to fire any Navy secretary, most recently John Phelan, who doesn’t seem to be working hard enough to make the president’s version of Victory at Sea into our global reality. As President Trump put it at one point, “The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I’m a very aesthetic person.” (Hey, the Trump fleet is going to be a stunner! Count on it!)

And oh (yet again), as it turned out, only one of us would have the power late in life to kidnap Venezuela’s head of state, try to claim Greenland as the property of this country, prepare for a possible future war with Cuba, blow ships out of the water in a never-ending fashion in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, launch staggering numbers of airstrikes in (yes, can you believe it?) Somalia — well, of course you can’t because, with the exception of Dave DeCamp at Antiwar.com, those bombings are barely covered in this country — as well as at one point in Nigeria, launch a genuine war with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz (brilliantly crippling the global economy while he was at it), and… well, count on it, in the next two-plus years of Donald Trump’s America, there will surely be all too many more examples to cite. In truth, it’s probably not even worth trying to imagine what countries might prove to be next for the “President of Peace,” as he’s distinctly unpredictable on such matters (on just about any matter, in fact).

Trump Reigns (But Doesn’t........

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