Although Donald Trump has acknowledged being aware of the term “America First” and its historical context, he has nevertheless called it “a brand-new modern term. I never related it to the past.” Whether that is true or not, the fact is that the slogan is a specific throwback to a particular movement, and perhaps by coincidence — or someone whispering it in his ear — it became the brand name for his foreign policy when, in reality, he didn’t have one.
Trump, along with Stephen Miller and his then-aide Steve Bannon, managed to string together a type of isolationist doctrine in his first inaugural address, a speech that became known as “American Carnage” (or, in the words of George W. Bush “some weird s**t”). “For many decades,” he said, “we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry, subsidized the armies of other countries, while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military. We’ve defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own and spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.” Over the better part of the next decade, he vowed to end America’s “forever wars.”
Trump’s earlier embrace of isolationism is coming back to haunt him. And it has resulted in what just might be his only positive contribution to American life.
Now, as he has, according to Politifact, obtained the dubious distinction of having “authorized the highest number of strikes and targeted the most countries of all the 21st century presidents,” Trump’s earlier embrace of isolationism is coming back to haunt him. And it has resulted in what just might be his only positive contribution to American life.
The president’s contemporary version of America First owes much to the original movement, which was formed in the 1930s as another world war began looking increasingly likely in Europe. Even as Britain declared war on Nazi Germany in 1939, about one million Americans opposed entering the conflict on the Allied side. The America First movement was championed by powerful Republicans, and its chief spokesman was the aviator Charles Lindbergh, a national hero who barnstormed the country with the isolationist message that the war was unwinnable and America should stay out of it. It also became apparent that most America First supporters had a bit of a soft spot for the Nazis and Adolf Hitler, believing that National Socialism was a smashing idea. In other words, this stateside brand of isolationism was really about letting their fascist friends in Germany have a free pass.
Pearl Harbor put an end to all that when Hitler foolishly declared war on the United States four days after the Japanese attack. He apparently believed the America First hype: that America didn’t have the industrial capacity to fight a two-front war, and that Roosevelt would be so weakened he would lose his grip on power. It was one of the German chancellor’s worst strategic blunders.
Once the war was on, the isolationist movement was largely dead and buried — and stayed that way for almost 75 years. In fact, throughout the entire post- World War II era, the right never met a war it didn’t want to fight, and they viciously excoriated the anti-war left as traitorous. “Love it or leave it,” they cried. “My country, right or wrong!”
This attitude, which came to serve the anti-communist cause in the latter half of the 20th century, carried through to the period after the Sept. 11 attacks and Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, when conservatives displayed a fetish for suppressing dissent and characterizing the left’s opposition to the war as unpatriotic, even going as far to call them a “fifth column.” When the Iraq War ended up being a historic debacle and Bush found his poll numbers mired in the 20s, most of the conflict’s Republican cheerleaders had little to say. They had been expecting a glorious triumph, a remaking of the Middle East, and all they got was another lousy stalemate.
Still, no Republican politician dared to admit that the war had been a mistake; that would have been tantamount to treason in the GOP. Some even showed an appetite for a sequel, like when Arizona Sen. John McCain, who was running in the 2008 Republican primary, entertained audiences with a rousing rendition of “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” sung to the Beach Boys’ 1965 classic “Barbara Ann.”
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Donald Trump emerged fully on the national political scene during this odd moment of right-wing confusion following the election of President Barack Obama, and took the anti-war position purely as a way to position himself against his predecessors of both parties and take advantage of the country’s war weariness. Trump sensed that the neo-conservative movement’s idealism — which had promised the U.S. could remake, through the use of military force and regime change, the Middle East as a region of Jeffersonian democracies — had been repudiated. But he was canny, understanding that the way to the GOP’s heart was through its inherent xenophobia, so he couched his opposition in terms that would resonate with the right. Free-loading foreigners were taking advantage of the United States, something he had been blathering about since the 1980s.
Trump claimed he had opposed the Iraq War, although no proof ever emerged that he’d said so, despite the fact that he had been on camera constantly for decades. “I was elected on getting out of these ridiculous endless wars,” he frequently claimed after winning the presidency in 2016, “where our great Military functions as a policing operation to the benefit of people who don’t even like the USA.” But he also made strangely incongruous comments like “We should have kept the oil,” and despite negotiating the 2020 Doha agreement, he failed to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan, leaving that task to his successor, Joe Biden.
Despite his pacifist claims, there is nothing in Trump’s personality that tracks with being anti-war. He wakes up every single morning spoiling for a fight with someone.
Despite his pacifist claims, there is nothing in Trump’s personality that tracks with being anti-war. He wakes up every single morning spoiling for a fight with someone. The comments he made during his first campaign — about how much he would love to torture terrorist suspects, kill their wives and families and shoot them with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood — should have been a clue that the president is not a peacenik, no matter how much he begs and pleads for the Nobel Peace Prize. (Once, he even once let slip, “I love war, in a certain way,” which may have been one of the most honest moments of his political career.)
The truth emerged during his second term. Trump has spent much of his time blowing up boats in the Caribbean; deposing Venezuela’s president and elevating its vice president; unleashing the National Guard and federal immigration agents in Democratic-led cities throughout the country; saber-rattling against Mexico, Cuba, Canada and Greenland; partnering with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a bloody war of choice against Iran; and threatening a series of war crimes in a bid to destroy its entire civilization.
Most Democrats never really bought his “I’m ending the forever wars” schtick. But, interestingly enough, Republicans apparently did — the party that has always been the first to wave the flag and chant “no glory like old glory.” Today, most of them are fully bought into the Trump myth.
The older ones, I suspect, are just going along with him for the ride in Iran; perhaps they have found ways to excuse the president’s newfound love for “warfighting,” or maybe their natural bloodlust has been reawakened after having gone dormant from Trump fever.
But younger members of the president’s MAGA coalition aren’t buying it. POLITICO has reported that Turning Point USA chapters in battleground states are seeing a lot of dissension and dismay among Trump’s Gen Z supporters who believed his “no new wars” pledge. In fact, it was one of the main reasons they voted for him.
According to a POLITICO/Public First poll, just 28% of Trump voters aged 18 to 34 support the Iran war. That number is very bad news for Republicans; it indicates that the GOP’s newest voters are not going to go along with the party’s demands for more military spending and foreign military adventurism. And it may even mean that there is an emerging anti-war consensus forming across party lines, which would be a massive change in American politics.
Trump never meant what he said about being an isolationist, and he certainly hasn’t ended all the wars he claims to have resolved. Instead, he has been starting new ones — and is apparently planning to start others. But if he managed to convince young conservative Republicans that being anti-war is the right thing, and if they continue to believe that and refuse to go along with his militarism, Donald Trump may have just done something truly good for our country and its future without even realizing it.
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