Trump’s Media Boosters Try to Refashion Him as ‘Anti-War’ — It’s Nonsense

A pervasive myth about Donald Trump has once again reared its head this election season: that he is the “anti-war” candidate.

Donald the Dove is a character trotted out, once every four years, as reliably as partisan fury over Nate Silver’s election model. It was most infamously — because of how much she rankled the sensitivities of New York Times readers — put forth by Maureen Dowd, who wrote in 2016: “[Trump] can sound belligerent, of course, saying that he would bomb the expletive-deleted out of ISIS and that he would think up new and imaginative ways to torture terrorists and kill their families. But he says that in most cases he would rather do the art of the deal than shock and awe.”

Lately, the perception that Trump is a peace-monger has gained steam among his more nationalist supporters, most prominently Tucker Carlson, who recently celebrated Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for president.

“They have everything in common,” Carlson said of Cheney and Harris. “They are both neocons. It tells you what a lie this race and gender stuff is. That’s not the divide. The divide is in your heart, and if you think it’s okay to kill people in order to get rich, then you are on their side, and if you don’t, you’re on our side.”

Tulsi Gabbard, a veteran turned House Democrat turned occasional Fox News host, concurred. At an event with Carlson, she said: “A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for Dick Cheney, the architect of everything that has gone wrong in the Middle East for the last few decades.” She has endorsed Trump and declared his movement to be one opposed to “endless wars.”

On Carlson’s old network Fox News, the perception is the same. “The Republican Party is changed under MAGA,” Fox host Tom Shillue said recently. “It is an anti-war party. It is an anti-globalist party. And it is an anti-authoritarian party. That is something that the Democrats used to be able to claim, and with some justification,. They are no longer. They are the pro-authoritarian, pro-war and globalist party.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Trump, a man he once called a “sociopath,” on the basis of his apparent believe that Trump wants “to end the grip of the neocons on U.S. foreign policy.” Vivek Ramaswamy tried to convince reporters at a pro-Palestine protest last month that Trump is the anti-war choice. “If you’re anti-war, compare 4 years under Trump to 4 years under Biden/Harris,” he later wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “You might not like Trump. But you can’t argue with the result.”

The list goes on. And while the argument is commonly made by Trump’s biggest boosters, it’s also an assumption held by many Americans regardless of their political persuasion. Yet it is totally untrue. In fact, it’s one of the most pervasive myths in American politics.

Sure, Trump broke with Republican tradition in 2016 by attacking George W. Bush over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He pledged to end America’s predilection for “endless wars” and managed to start no new ones while in office. But he embraced militarism just as much as his contemporaries, if not more. He lifted the constraints that Barack Obama had placed on drone strikes and commando raids, and ended up carrying out more drone strikes in the first two years of his presidency than Obama did in eight. By the end of Trump’s term, 65 American soldiers had died in combat. 16 have died under President Joe Biden, according to a report from Washington Monthly. That statistic alone should put an end to the fantasy that Trump is somehow “anti-war.”

Matt Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former adviser to Bernie Sanders, wrote about this misconception last year in a piece for Foreign Policy:

These pieces all rest heavily on the claim that Trump launched no new wars. That’s true as far as it goes. But it was certainly not for lack of trying. Trump might not have started any wars, but he massively inflamed existing ones—and came close to catastrophic new ones.

Let’s review the record. Despite inveighing against “endless wars,” Trump massively escalated the country’s existing wars in multiple theaters, leading to skyrocketing casualties. In Afghanistan, he substantially upped the amount of airstrikes, leading to a 330 percent increase in civilian deaths. In Yemen, he escalated both U.S. counterterrorism activities and support for the devastating Saudi-led war against the Houthis. According to the United Kingdom’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism, there were 2,243 drone strikes in just the first two years of Trump’s presidency, compared with 1,878 in the entire eight years of the Obama administration.

And while Biden takes heat from the left for his enabling of Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, Trump has promised to be even more supportive of it. “Israel is the one. And you should let them go and let them go finish the job. He doesn’t want to do it,” Trump said of Biden at their June debate. “He’s become like a Palestinian.” What’s more, Trump has said he would crush the only true anti-war movement in the country right now, the one protesting U.S. support for Israel, and deport its members out of the United States.

If that’s not enough to convince you, take Trump’s running mate, whose views on foreign policy are more precisely articulated than Trump’s. Carlson has frequently touted JD Vance as anti-war — so much so that he reportedly argued to Trump that if he did not select Vance, U.S. intelligence agencies would have him assassinated so that whatever “neocon” he did select would ascend to the presidency.

When Trump eventually picked the Ohio senator, Carlson said those who oppose Vance do so only because he opposes “killing other people in pointless wars” and “they thought he would be harder to manipulate and slightly less enthusiastic about killing people.”

But Vance is not anti-war. Like many right-wing contrarians that have grown in popularity in the Trump era, he is steadfastly opposed to supporting Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. Yet that is an outlier in an otherwise militaristic foreign policy outlook.

Vance steadfastly supports arming Israel, and has proposed a more muscular approach to Iran. “We need to do something with Iran,” Vance said in July. “But not these weak little bombing runs. If you’re going to punch the Iranians, you punch them hard.” His views are hard to distinguish from those of Lindsey Graham, a man so comically enamored by the mere thought of bombing Iran that Carlson has often labeled him a childless, bloodthirsty neo-con.

It’s worth remembering that despite this vast heel-turn, almost everyone I have cited here supported the Iraq War, from Trump to Carlson. Vance and Gabbard signed up to serve in it. You can chalk up their newfound anti-war fervor to the zeal of the converted, but the fact remains that their chosen peace-monger is far from a dove.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.