Trump is not the peace candidate: don't be fooled by the false prophet of anti-interventionism.

AuthorWelch, Matt
PositionFrom the Top - Donald Trump - Editorial

IN THE ONGOING AUTHORITARIAN outrage that is the 2016 presidential primary season, many self-described libertarians are in an oddly celebratory mood.

"If Trump gets the Republican nomination the neocons are through as a viable political force on the Right," Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo enthused at the end of February. "And if Trump actually wins the White House, the military-industrial complex is finished, along with the globalists who dominate foreign policy circles in Washington."

Raimondo was far from alone in his desperately wishful thinking about the coming golden age of anti-interventionism. "Only Trump's brash bombast can finally displace the toxic neocon ideology that has mutated the GOP into the handmaiden of the Warfare State," former Reagan budget director David Stockman wrote that same week. Paleoconservative godfather Patrick Buchanan chimed in with a hearty laugh at "the death rattle of an establishment fighting for its life."

It's not hard to see how the paleo crowd wound up here. After Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) exited the 2016 race in early February, Trump pivoted toward a colorfully blunt critique of the dysfunctional defense appropriations process, vowing in New Hampshire to hold the line on Pentagon spending by going after politically corrupt waste and profiteering. At the February 13 debate in the heavily military state of South Carolina, Trump called the Iraq War a "big, fat mistake" that squandered $2 trillion and "destabilized the Middle East," and he said of the Bush administration officials who prosecuted it: "They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none."

This direct attack on Jeb Bush and his family's interventionist track record, coupled with the undeniably true but apparently shocking statement that the "World Trade Center came down during your brother's reign," led many conservative commentators to declare, once again, that this time Trump had finally gone too far. When he promptly breezed to a 10-point victory one week later, croaking Bush and cementing himself as the only candidate with a real shot at winning the majority of delegates before the Republican National Convention, the conclusion was clear: Foreign policy, militarism, and even tear-jerking paeans to politicians who govern during crises--in other words, about 90 percent of the content at the 2004 Republican National Convention--were no longer safe political spaces for the GOP. Donald...

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