Trump Isn't Anti-War, He's Pro-Invader
That's not how anti-war works.
One of the most irritating things for me about this entire election has been the confounding absurdity of the claims that Donald Trump is or has ever been “anti-war.” People repeat it as fact, his own supporters in particular, seeming to enjoy needling us with “Now Democrats are the party of war and we are the party of peace!”
He claims it, sure — because one thing he’s been obnoxiously good at has been taking enormously popular left-wing stances and talking points (that mainstream Democrats have often avoided) and warping them to fit his own purposes — but as with everything else, he’s only using it in order to get away with even more evil shit.
Case in point — whom did he just announce he plans to nominate as our ambassador to the United Nations? Why it’s Elise Stefanik, one of the biggest neocon warhawks in our entire government. No one loves war like Elise Stefanik!
As Daniel Larison at Truthout points out, “[b]efore being elected to Congress, she worked at the hardline Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, and she worked at the extremely hawkish Foreign Policy Initiative that was co-founded by Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan.”
Not only that, she has been one of the most vocal supporters of Israel’s war on Gaza and has repeatedly demanded that universities crack down on the free speech of student protestors. She’s also demanded that the United States block funding to the United Nations Relief Works Agency, the main provider of humanitarian aid to suffering Palestinians, and suggested that there needs to be a “complete reassessment of US funding of the United Nations” after the Palestinian Authority suggested that Israel should be kicked out of the organization for reasons of human rights abuses.
I understand that many Democrats (well, 25 percent as of last March) share Stefanik’s views on the Gaza situation, as well as on student protesters — but it’s notable that only Democrats suffered negative consequences for their support and Republicans haven’t suffered any, despite the fact that they (and Trump, in particular) are categorically worse on this issue.
How much worse? Well, for one, there’s a reason Netanyahu is delighted that Trump was elected again, and a reason why Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich has announced plans to immediately begin annexing the West Bank — a plan supported by settlement leaders and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. Trump supported Netanyahu and West Bank settlers throughout his first term, and they know they can count on his support again.
Gideon Sa’ar, Israel’s foreign minister, revealed on Monday that this had been discussed during Trump’s first term as president, well before the war even started. You know, like back when his administration declared that the West Bank settlements do not violate international law (which, you know, they do).
Stefanik and Ben Gvir will likely have a lot in common, given that they have both endorsed viewpoints famously shared by mass murderers. Stefanik, for her part, has been a real big fan of the notoriously antisemitic “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory espoused by multiple US mass murderers, including Payton Gendron, who used it to justify killing 10 Black people in a Buffalo supermarket not far from the New York district she represents, while Ben Gvir once decorated his living room with a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the 1994 Hebron Cave of the Patriarchs Massacre, in which he brutally murdered 29 Muslims as they prayed.
Regular hippies, these people are.
And, of course, there’s Jared Kushner — the architect of Trump’s Middle East policies in his first term — who is real excited for all the valuable “waterfront property” that Israel could have if they just forced Palestinians out of Gaza for good. After all, what’s wrong with a little ethnic cleansing if it comes with a lovely view?
As far as Ukraine goes? Trump has repeatedly said that they should have just given Putin Crimea and whatever other areas of the country he wanted and agreed not to join NATO in order to appease him.
There is a difference between arming a country that is being invaded (as with Ukraine) and being or arming the country that is doing the invading. If you side with the aggressors, you’re not anti-war, you’re just pro-oppression.
Now, there are people who have pointed out that the US did not enter into any new wars during Trump’s first term. They did things that would later lead to wars being fought, but sure — technically that is true. However, allow me to note that his use of drones far exceeded Obama’s by the first two years he was in office.
From a 2019 Chicago-Sun Times article:
According to a 2018 report in The Daily Beast, Obama launched 186 drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan during his first two years in office. In Trump’s first two years, he launched 238.
The Trump administration has carried out 176 strikes in Yemen in just two years, compared with 154 there during all eight years of Obama’s tenure, according to a count by The Associated Press and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Experts also say drone strikes under President Trump have surged in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
And, as was the case during Obama’s presidency, these strikes have resulted in untold numbers of civilian casualties. According to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, U.S. drone strikes in Afghanistan killed more than 150 civilians in the first nine months of 2018.
Amnesty International reports drones have killed at least 14 civilians in Somalia since 2017.
Whoops!
Trump has also quite notably offered support and admiration for dictators who, for lack of a better term, have gone to war against their own people. He was a big fan of Filipino dictator Rodrigo Duterte, who killed 7,000 of his own people as part of his “war on drugs,” and even invited him to the White House. Trump also enjoyed palling around with Egypt’s Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who was appointed president in a military coup against the country’s first freely elected civilian president that led to police opening fire on and killing over 1150 people. And, of course, we all know of his bromances with Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan (who leads the world in imprisonment of journalists … for now, anyway), Putin, Kim Jong Un, and, for a time, China’s Xi Jinping.
That’s not peaceful. No one gets to be a “dove” while offering support for these men, who kill, torture and unjustly imprison their own citizens. As far as I can tell, Trump has never offered a single word of admiration for any world leader that did not aggressively oppress either their own people or another people.
Oh! But he has repeatedly said he plans to use the military to go after left-wing protesters.
I oppose war because I don’t want to see people get hurt or killed or oppressed, regardless of the context. Trump only says he opposes war because he knows that most Americans oppose war and is willing to exploit their desire for peace (or the “desire for peace” they pretend to have in order to “own the libs”) in order to offer support to some of the cruelest regimes in existence.
You can’t actually be anti-war if you are on the side of the aggressors, or if you are on the side of dictators doing violence to their own people. That is not how “anti-war” works. You can’t say “Oh, I’m such an incredible peacenik, I believe that when a country is invaded or occupied, or a people are oppressed, they should just immediately back down and let the aggressors do or have whatever they want,” which is largely what his position has been at every opportunity he has been given. At no point has he ever sided with any people who have actually been oppressed against their oppressor, and that is where the difference lies.
I’m still processing the fact that this hideous traitor is going to be our president again. We haven’t forgotten about those documents, motherfucker.
God, this country has gone mad.
Yesterday, in Notes, I had a snowflake crying because I was mean to him after he made some really shitty, racist, bigoted, homophobic comments about George Takei. I kid you not.