Once Again, For Those In The Back, Trump's Whole Anti-War Thing Was Always A Troll

As is pretty much every other position he's ever held.

Back in January, expressing frustration that he did not win the Nobel Peace Prize, even though the committee was likely highly aware of his fondness for gold things with his name emblazoned on them, Donald Trump announced that he no longer felt any obligation to think “purely of peace.” The idea that he had previously been thinking “purely of peace” likely came as something of a surprise to Palestinians, to Greenland, Panama, Somalia, Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria, Cuba, Yemen, and Syria, to undocumented immigrants in the United States, American citizens who look like they might be undocumented citizens, American citizens who don’t like seeing ICE officers terrorize those they suspect might be undocumented citizens, and the civilian victims of his countless drone strikes. Of course, we don’t know who those people are or how many of them there are, because Trump undid an Obama-era rule (reinstated under Joe Biden and reversed again in Trump’s second term) requiring that these civilian deaths be documented and reported.

Over the weekend, as we all know by now, he launched strikes against Iran in the name of regime change, a move that should make it clear to everyone everywhere that he is not and has never been “Donald the Dove.” Rather, he has only ever been “Donald the Troll.” Like all trolls, he routinely takes positions he does not sincerely believe in order to provoke a response from those he wishes to undermine.

During his 2016 run and afterward, he repeatedly and purposely exploited divisions within the Democratic Party and hypocrisies resulting from previous attempts at moderation and incrementalism (like support for civil unions over same-sex marriage), along with the inability/refusal of the establishment wings of either party to read a room, especially as it concerned support for war and regime change. Trump’s “I’m totally anti-war” thing really only started because it was a very easy way to attack Hillary Clinton, whose vote for the Iraq War and great love of Henry Kissinger, incredibly, did not go over too well with a lot of people.

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There are two kinds of Trump supporters: his fellow trolls and his true believers. The trolls were happy to pretend they were against regime change when it suited them and suited him, and are now more than happy to go full Freedom Fries now that it doesn’t.

Meanwhile, many of the true believers are freaking out, posting videos of Charlie Kirk talking about how he thought bombing Iran would be a bad idea, as if he too would not have immediately flipped, and calling the whole thing a great betrayal of what they had imagined were “America First” ideals.

Will this blowback last, though? I don’t actually think it will. Unfortunately, right now we have a whole lot of Democrats who are only comfortable opposing the war on procedural grounds — arguing, more or less, that they just want to hear Trump’s reasons for attacking Iran and that he should have let them vote for it in Congress first before doing that (even though we already know that Chuck Schumer and company were going hard against Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie’s push for a war powers vote last week despite now publicly supporting Tim Kaine’s bill for a vote).

Via The Guardian:

Joel Rubin, a former assistant deputy secretary of state, said: “You have two streams on this. You have a chunk that is virulently opposed to any military action whatsoever related to Iran. That’s a minority, but it’s a significant minority and it’s an important group of members and they’re loud. They frame it as an illegal activity, even though it’s not, but they call it that and then they slip into a variety of other arguments against military action.

“The second group are basically we don’t like the process, we needed to be briefed, we needed more clarity about how long it’s going to be, what’s the on-the-ground operation – process questions and should-have-come-to-Congress kind of stuff, but not necessarily opposed to what’s happening.”

Then we’ve got MAGA “Democrat” John Fetterman tweeting that he is a “hard no” on doing a war powers vote, we assume on the grounds that Trump is far too special and beautiful to have to beg Congress to let him declare war like some kind of not-king.

The one thing Democrats really need to understand here is that they are the only ones who will face any consequences for all of this, either way. If they oppose it now, they will be called terrorist-loving, America-hating soy boy communists. If they support it now and it goes wrong, which it inevitably will, they will be held accountable for the whole thing and will be the only ones to face consequences for it afterwards, just like they were the only ones who faced consequences for supporting the Iraq War, NAFTA and civil unions over same-sex marriage.

Why? Because the perception is that both parties are insincere and disingenuous, but that while Republicans will disingenuously and insincerely support good things in order to come across as moderate enough to win elections, Democrats will disingenuously and insincerely support bad things (or straddle the line) in order to be seen as moderate enough to win elections. Maybe it’s not fair, but it’s also not hard to see why the latter is frequently seen as worse in retrospect.

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Trump is a child and will never truly be held to account for anything. We could say this is a distraction from the Epstein files or ICE violence or the fact that we are imprisoning child refugees or even a bid to boost his approval rating, but were those things even really going to hurt him or his pals in the long term? Not with his constituency, which can easily be won back with a quick “Democrats are going to trans all the kids!”

Still, anyone who believed Trump was sincerely anti-war in 2016 was a fool, and those who claimed it in 2024 were either damn fools or just as trollish and full of shit as he was. The only thing he believes in sincerely is his own glorification, and if he can’t get that through pretending to give a damn about peace, he’ll try to get it through war and very expensive ballrooms.

OPEN THREAD.

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