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The O. Zone: Trump’s long list of broken campaign promises just jumped to yet another forever war
I agree wholeheartedly with President Donald Trump.
At least the version of Trump from the 2024 presidential campaign who said a vote for him was a vote to “turn the page forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars. They never ended.”
Or this Trump from his first presidential campaign in 2015 who said of Afghanistan, “We made a terrible mistake getting involved there in the first place.” Or 2016 Trump who said of the Iraq War, “We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, we don’t even have the oil.”
Transactional Trump sees war as a way to get things. Screw democracy. Trump sees support for Ukraine — battling for its self-determination and really just its right to exist in the face of a brutal Russian invasion — as a way to get rare earth minerals for his tech bro supporters. Israel’s flattening of Gaza and killing of more than 50,000 Palestinians is a real estate play.
Even allies like Denmark and Canada ought to be leery of Trump’s tendency to flex military might because he wants to take toys away from annoying kids he doesn’t like in the sandbox and bestow them on his Tech Broligarchy buds who say nice things about him and give him lots of money to win elections.
So what do we make of Trump breaking yet another campaign promise by bombing Iran over the weekend at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu and an ascendant and authoritarian Israeli state that no longer seems to have any interest in lasting peace or a two-state solution?
To me, it seems as if Trump decided, probably based on the last person he talked to before launching the attack, that the bombing of a sovereign, albeit brutally repressive, nation of 90 million people was worth it to distract from his increasingly unpopular domestic policies.
And that if a protracted war in the region causes further economic disruption piled on top of his misguided tariff taxes, cuts to infrastructure and renewable energy spending, and mass deportation of law-abiding workers in critical construction, agriculture and hospitality industries, then at least he’ll have something other than his own economic bumbling to blame it all on.
If you’re paying more at the pump this summer due to instability in the Persian Gulf, just as you’re currently paying more for groceries and imported goods at Walmart, while your rural hospital is shutting down due to Trump’s Medicaid cuts, remember who ran on a platform of getting us out of forever wars and bringing down prices for everything from eggs to gasoline.
Finally, if you live in a rural resort area like ours, think about how uncertain the travel and tourism industry has become during the first six months of Trump’s second term. People are literally afraid to come to the United States thanks to the draconian overreach of our Department of Homeland Security, and now travel for Americans in the rest of the world just became a lot more uncertain given Trump’s unilateral and quite possibly illegal attack on Iran.
I understand the nation we’ve been locked in ideological battle with since the Islamic Revolution and hostage crisis in 1979 could not acquire a nuclear weapon the way Israel deceptively did back in the 1960s, but Trump took us out of a verifiable Iran nuclear deal that achieved that goal, while promising a better deal that never materialized, and seemingly gave us no choice but to bomb – at least that’s the way he’s spinning it, despite his own intelligence to the contrary.
The original Iran nuclear deal had lots of problems, chief among them not addressing Iran’s funding of proxy terror groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, but it was a starting place, and Trump ripped it up on a whim because it was inked by President Barack Obama. The results? Iran just launched retaliatory strikes on U.S. troops in nearby Qatar.
Now even Trump’s own MAGA base – deeply opposed to blood-for-oil forever wars in the Middle East – must deal with those consequences as Trump uses an undeclared war on another Middle Eastern country as a smoke screen for massive billionaire tax cuts funded by the slashing of Medicaid and the sale of public lands across 11 states, including Colorado.
Editor’s note: The O. Zone is a recurring opinion column by RealVail.com publisher David O. Williams. Please read how you can help support this site by considering a donation or signing up for news alerts … or both.
David O. Williams
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