Donald Trump Isn’t Antiwar. He’s Anti-West. Learn the Difference. |
Donald Trump’s successful infiltrations into the worlds of both real estate and politics have been constructed on a foundation of cons. One of the more important of these, in both 2016 and 2024, was the strange notion that he was some sort of “antiwar” candidate. You remember: Hillary Clinton was the hawk, the mad bomber; Trump was a man of peace.
This was always propaganda. Yes, with respect to Iraq, it was kind of true. Clinton voted for the war as a senator. (This is the irony of her political career: Back during the lead-up to the Iraq War, the accepted Beltway wisdom was that “yea” was the safe political vote for a Democrat eyeing the presidency to make. And yet, her vote arguably cost her the nomination in 2008 and played some role in costing her the presidency in 2016, when the right really drove home the “Hillary as hawk” narrative.)
But Trump wasn’t nearly the Iraq War critic that he wanted people to believe—he expressed support for the war in the run-up and in its early days, and he only turned against it when it starting going south. Even then, his main criticism was that U.S. forces didn’t max out the possible conquest by taking Iraq’s oil—a fact that’s well worth remembering in this particular news cycle.
Speaking of, here we are, a decade after his first campaign, with Trump having just started his own little unilateral regime-change war. You can choose to call what’s happening in Venezuela a “legal action” or whatever you like, but if someone killed more than 100 American civilians at sea, making accusations about what they were up to without offering proof, and then sent more than 150 aircraft into our airspace and killed 40 of our civilians while arresting and forcefully extraditing our president, I reckon we’d be calling it “war.”
So what’s going on here? Why is the antiwar president making war?
The answer is that Trump is not antiwar. He never has been. That was always a fiction peddled by Trump, his lackeys, and the right-wing media to contrast him with Clinton and Joe Biden to fool the Gullible American community. He is anti-West. Here’s the difference, and why it can look confusing to people who don’t know any better.
When “the West,” led usually by the United States, starts a war, it does so in support of certain........