At first, Donald Trump’s insistence that Liz Cheney should have “guns … trained on her face” was just the typical violent rhetoric that should ruin him as a politician but doesn’t. However, Trump saw an opportunity to pivot and he took it (WaPo [1], emphasis added).
“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump said of Cheney, following a tangent about his pardon in 2018 of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, her father. “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
Trump followed up with a social media post on Friday saying his point was that Cheney herself would not fight. He also doubled down on insulting her intelligence, calling her a “War Hawk, and a dumb one at that.”
“If you ever put her into the field of battle, she’d be the first one to chicken out,” Trump told reporters at a campaign stop at a coffee shop in Michigan on Friday. “She wouldn’t fight, she’d chicken out so fast, and that’s all I say.”
In other words, it’s totally fine to talk about Cheney getting killed by dropping her alone in a war zone … or something.
The Return of the Reagan Democrats
More to the point, Trump had a chance to relive the good old days (for him), when he made isolationism respectable [2] in the GOP by turning on the Iraq War. Add this to his refusal to say Ukraine should win its war for survival (NBC [3]) and you get arguably the whitest dove America has seen since Vietnam.
Well, except for his sycophant Steven Miller, who went all … this.
I remember the last time a campaign went this hard into their presidential opponent (and out of the zone we call reality). It was 1980 – and the campaign was to re-elect Jimmy Carter.
Carter lost that election and has long since gone into a very noble 44-year retirement (imagine if he’d had 48 years). His opponent and successor was Ronald Reagan, who not only avoided World War III but also won Cold War I and helped to liberate over 100 million Eastern Europeans from de facto Russian imperialism.
Much, and more, has changed since then. However, there are still some of us who remember when America led the democratic world to victory over tyrants. We also remember that the times we fail lead to horrific consequences that the “anti-war” crowd likes to forget or ignore. So if Trump et al are so eager to become Carter Republicans, I will gladly take the label of Reagan Democrat (and I doubt I’m alone). Let the Republicans be the party calling America “a garbage can” (ABC [4]); we’ll remind her that she is (and must continue to be) the shining city on the hill.
The Argument Comes Home
If I can get a little more personal, this blog was launched two decades ago in the midst of another divisive war (Iraq). It was the place for those who believed America could and should help the Iraqi people against Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime. This is, of course, the very conflict that Trump used to make the Republicans isolationist again. The years since have seen changes to the blog, the Republican Party, the conservative movement, and America.
I was drawn to it, first as a reader and than as a contributor, because it reminded me of the arguments of Vietnam, and where I told myself I would have been had I lived through them. The opponents of Iraq’s liberation explicitly cited Vietnam as an example of wars gone wrong. For them, fighting the Vietnam War meant hundreds of thousands dead (US Navy [5]) for no reason (because the Cold War was won). To me, losing the Vietnam War led to the fall of non-Communist Cambodia, leading to more deaths than during the entire war (Weiner Holocaust Library [6]). Once again, lives lost in war were an outrage, while lives lost during the “peace” of terror (in Iraq’s case, before the war) were an afterthought.
Now we have another war (Ukraine) in which the siren song of “peace” could drown out the cries of those killed by Russian cruelty during occupation. Once again, I refuse to ignore the voices of the victims. Twenty years ago, I was neither a Democrat nor a contributor here. I would have been surprised to express my views with my current party.
But I am honored that I can do so as a Bearing Drift writer.