Trump Is Not Your Candidate for World Peace
We are dealing with two colliding lies.
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As part of his ongoing effort to emasculate President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump has spent years ridiculously claiming that the world would be a much more peaceful place if he were still in charge, and that he was the first president in 72 years who “didn’t have any wars.”
Never mind the ignorant diction — “have any wars”? As in American troops were not involved? As in the world was at utter peace? — such a statement makes no sense in that no president is a wizard. They cannot wave a magic wand and stop what is happening in Sudan, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere across the world. War’s causes are mainly political, territorial or ideological. They are often waged at the hands of strongmen like Russian President Vladimir Putin or by repressive governments like the one in Myanmar. Pretending that you, and you alone — even as the so-called leader of the free world — can stop such horrors is probably an illness diagnosable somewhere in the DSM-5.
Also, we know that Trump exaggerates and flat-out lies more than most, but his eliding over the atrocities that happened abroad during his presidency is staggering. While he was president, at least 65 active duty troops died in conflicts, according to the Defense Department.
So really, we are dealing with two colliding lies: that having Trump in charge means more peace, and that Trump in charge means fewer deaths of U.S. servicemen and -women.
(NB: These are the military men and women he has called “losers” and “suckers,” despite his denial in the recent debate that he ever said this.)
In January, Trump declared that an attack that killed three American military personnel in Jordan at the Syrian border “would NEVER have happened if I was President, not even a chance.”
His yelled assertion is part of a constant, annoyingly randomly capitalized lie by Trump and that the United States is not safe under Democratic rule, that he is such a consummate negotiator that Putin would never have waged war with Ukraine, and that Hamas wouldn’t have committed the Oct. 7 terror attack in Israel. These are ludicrous assertions on their face, if only because neither invader does not have enough interest in what the U.S. does or does not want in these situations, let alone an uneducated poser like Trump.
(Raise your hand if you think Putin manipulated the sad, bad man…)
If anything, Trump set the stage for the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel by further disenfranchising Palestinians in his boorish backing of the Israeli government, including his support for moving the country’s capital to Jerusalem, no matter the political and human fallout.
Not only did Trump escalate the dangerously ever-teetering conflict between the U.S. and Iran by killing Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and, more recently, by encouraging Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO members he deemed as delinquent in their payments, he did absolutely nothing we know of to foster world peace — or anything that made our troops around the world safer.
The numbers of military members killed abroad aren’t yet out for the last couple of years of Biden’s presidency so far, but certainly, troops have been killed during his tenure. Biden’s claim in June that he is “the only president this century that doesn’t have any — this — this decade — doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world, like Trump did” remains to be seen, but the official total in the first two years of his presidency is about 16 — most died in a 2021 suicide bombing as the U.S. recklessly left Afghanistan.
Personally, I don’t think Biden wins any awards for making world peace, regardless of how he compares to Trump. But I think the lies and exaggerations on both sides, but mainly on the part of the former liar-in chief, require being called out as we head into one of the most influential elections in our history as Americans.
Side note: During my research for this article, I found that conservative outlets like Fox News, The Washington Times and the New York Post offered a frustratingly misleading presentation of what Biden actually said in June. The outlets managed to pretend he never said the last three words of his quote, which entirely changes the meaning of his statement: “The truth is, I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any — this — this decade — doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world, like he did.” [Emphasis mine.] It’s so easy in journalism to slant stories this way. I’ve seen it too many times from the inside. And, from skimming over these outlets’ comment sections, I can tell you that no one bothered to fact-check what Biden actually said.
We are at a frightening turning point. I have no words of wisdom. But I can hunker down and parse the lies from the truth, and that’s what I’ve tried to do here. I am likely talking to the already converted, but if one person is unsure of whether to choose from the older man with seemingly sliding cognitive problems and the lying, megalomaniacal candidate, maybe they’ll read this and realize that our raging planet is on fire, and that we have no more capacity for kindling or matches, literal or political.
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What about the Abraham Accords? Trump was apart of that.
A journalist I trust! But I have to make an edit to your title. Trump is not my candidate for ANYTHING!