The warmongering pacifist

Nobody who listened to Donald Trump campaigning for president would have expected him to be more cavalier with using our military might than George W. Bush was but Commander in Chief Trump is not the same as Candidate Trump. Where Bush went to great lengths to justify war in the Middle East—seeking to convince others that they should support him and that he was justified in launching a war—Trump can’t be bothered to even seek concurrence, his word defines truth in his world.

There aren’t many things that I would count on to guide Trump’s actions but there are a few:

• He thinks immigrants (and other marginalized groups) deserve disdain or worse.
• He wants to lower taxes for the wealthy.
• He wants to dismantle anything that might act as a check against his own pursuits.
• He demands unconditional loyalty and he will test its unconditionality by demonstrating his willingness to publicly withdraw any semblance of reciprocal loyalty at any time and for any reason.

There might be only one positive thing that I would count on to influence his actions: he’s a consistent critic against open warfare. That pacifist bent would bring some comfort if he were an intelligent person rather than a cocky know it all.

Unfortunately Trump has an even more severe allergy to inconvenient facts (frankly, we did win the 2020 election) than Putin has. Putin’s allergy to learning what he didn’t want to know led him to start his 72-hour special military operation in Ukraine. Like Putin, Trump has a tendency to oversimplify the problems around him and believe that he has both the right and the might to impose his will on anyone else. (Unfortunately the GOP has spent nearly a decade validating that faulty misconception.)

Sadly, even while being utterly opposed to lasting military engagements such as those he had famously criticized, Trump’s allergy to learning anything that contradicts his established beliefs about himself and his “truth bends to my pronouncements” worldview™ could easily lead him into a military strike against an unbending Iran—especially if he believes he can accomplish the task within a week (or even a year).

While I trust that Trump’s anti-war sentiments are genuine they are nowhere near as close to the center of his identity as his need to be right and his desire to be seen as powerful or fearsome.