Trump Claiming To Be Anti-War Was Always Just Trolling
Trump the dove ... you remember the rest.
One thing I have always known, very deep in my bones, is that the whole “We’re totally the anti-war party now!” thing Republicans have been doing for the last few years was always disingenuous bullshit. Why? Largely because they’ve always been the pro-war crowd, but also because it doesn’t line up, in any fashion, with the whole rest of their ideology. Republicans love war because it makes them feel tough and manly, and because it usually causes an increase in rampant nationalism that allows them to get away with pretty much anything they want (see: PATRIOT Act). They also don’t care about other people, so there’s no real downside for them. Plus, they can usually get enough feckless Democrats to go along with it that they can blame it all on them when it all goes wrong.
In fact, the only “war” they’ve ever opposed has been the war in Ukraine, which we are not actually fighting. It’s not really that they hate war so much as they love Putin — which is why you don’t see them getting too het up over the military aid we provide to other nations or the fact that we’re literally the world’s largest arms exporter. There’s a very big difference between a nation fighting back against invaders and actually being the invaders.
Trump has been talking for weeks now about his plans to invade Greenland and the Panama Canal and maybe Canada. Earlier this week, during a press conference, he refused to rule out using military force to do so.
The fact is, if he really wants these places, he’ll probably have to invade them. None of them want to be acquired by the United States (especially a United States led by Trump), so what else is he going to do?
Panama’s leadership has made it clear that they will not go peacefully into that good night.
“Rules are rules and there are no exceptions,” Panama Canal Authority leader Ricuarte Vasquez Morales said. “We cannot discriminate for the Chinese, or the Americans, or anyone else. This will violate the neutrality treaty, international law and it will lead to chaos.”
The US is a pretty big fan of violating international law (see: our entire prison system), so it’s unlikely that this will provide much of a bulwark.
As far as Greenland goes — first, I just have to point out that no country that has universal health care and a robust social safety net is dying to join the US. Sorry, but it’s true.
“We would lose many benefits,” said Aviaaja Sandgren, a nurse interviewed by The New York Times. “We have free education, education grants, free health care, and free medicine. Everything is free here in Greenland.”
Denmark has made it clear that, while Greenland is free to go independent if they want, they’re not just going to hand the nation over to the US because Donald Trump wants it.
Additionally, leaders in both France and Germany have said that there is no way in hell that they would let the US just take over Greenland.
Via BBC:
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said “the principle of the inviolability of borders applies to every country ... no matter whether it's a very small one or a very powerful one”.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said “there is obviously no question that the European Union would let other nations of the world attack its sovereign borders”.
So, if Trump wants Greenland or the Panama Canal, he’s going to have to send our military to attack these nations, which will likely lead to other nations fighting us and a whole fun World War III scenario breaking out. His people will support him in this, because that’s what they always do.
The only reason any of them even started this “we’re anti-war now!” bit was because they needed something valid with which to attack Hillary Clinton, and the one big, glaring thing that everyone understood was bad was the time she went along with Republicans and voted in favor of letting Bush start the Iraq War. There’s never been any sincerity around it, they can’t explain why they oppose any military intervention. They claim it’s because “America First!” — which would be believable if they believed in spending money to make things better for Americans, which they do not. It’s not as if they’re saying, “Hey, let’s spend less money on war and more money on universal health care or the social safety net or housing programs!” like common liberal scum — the only things they support spending money on are the military, the police and prisons. Oh, and they’d like to send some tax money to homeschoolers, but that’s just so they can break the public schools.
Trump’s own characterization of himself as an “anti-war” president was similarly bullshit. He lied about not supporting the Iraq War, which he did. As president, while he didn’t start any new conflicts (technically), he escalated the ones we already had. He dropped a record number of bombs on Afghanistan, he escalated the drone war, he vetoed bipartisan congressional votes to end our involvement in Yemen, he dramatically increased the already-excessive Pentagon budget, expanded the military-industrial complex, and was otherwise quite bloodthirsty.
Now, it’s possible that Elizabeth Warren is correct that all of this talk is meant to be a distraction from his “embattled” nominees — and even if that’s not all of it, it could certainly be part. I think we’ve all mostly blocked out how chaotic things were during his first term, but you will recall that saying and doing many ridiculous and terrible things at once so that refuting them becomes impossibly exhausting has long been his M.O.
Still, there is something about the glee with which he and his acolytes talk about the prospect of getting their Manifest Destiny on that suggests that they, at the very least, think it will energize Republican voters, who tend to love a good display of dominance and strength. You can’t really be a dove when that’s what you value, and it’s becoming clear that the only reason they adopted this position was because there wasn’t a war that they liked that they could rally around, and they thought it would be fun to fuck with liberals by trying to play at “more peaceful than thou” for a while. But should Trump actually go through with this gambit, I’m pretty sure these people will show us that they only problem they actually had (retroactively, mind you) with the Iraq War was that it wasn’t explicitly advertised as a war for oil from the beginning.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
100 years after the Great War and we hit the replay button, only this time we’re the Prussians. My dad finds it hilarious that the Good/Evil labels have switched and now the Germans are the ones fighting for Democracy against us.
My trumper sister bagged on Biden as "pro war" because he gave money to Ukraine to fight against Russia. I'm going to send her emails every day once loser attacks someone.