TheAltWorld Donald Trump Goes to War
Using America’s sons and daughters to devastate the world
Sometimes a seemingly insignificant story tells one more about what is going on than the attempts being made to perceive the larger reality. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his army the big developing story was the Roman Republic’s impending Civil War pitting Caesar against the country’s Senate and Pompey the Great, but the Rubicon was particularly revealing in that it indicated that Caesar was willing to defy the Senate’s political control in pursuit of his own ambitions. Caesar understood the significance when he commented “Alea iacta est!” meaning “The die is cast!” and there was no going back on his decision which eventually led to his defeating Pompey and becoming Dictator for Life before he was assassinated by Brutus and Cassius on the Ides of March in 44 BC.
Likewise there is a lot of seemingly lesser important maneuvering in Donald Trump’s Washington that, if taken collectively, spells out a disaster in the making for our dear Republic just as Caesar sought to remake how and within what limits Rome was to be ruled in the future which led to the creation of the Roman Empire. Trump’s Rubicon moments might reasonably be seen as his declarations that he can “do whatever he wants” without any consequences and does not respect international or generally accepted law, instead relying on his own instincts and “feelings” in terms of what he should do in any given situation. This disregard for rules and law includes a willingness to ignore the Constitution of the United States when it comes to rights of citizens, international relations and going to war.
When attempting to judge just how far Trump might be willing to go in terms of his feelings, not to mention his subservience to foreign nations like Israel and its Jewish billionaire lobbyists, it is sometimes the small developments and blurted out admissions by the president and his band of sycophants that are most revealing. Some of my favorite Trumpisms relate to the military and the interventions and wars that he seems to find himself drawn to, complete with a “war” budget of $1.5 trillion which is the largest since the Second World War.
The irony is, of course, that Trump is demonstrably a draft dodger from Vietnam with his father Fred having paid a podiatrist Dr Larry Braunstein to fake up a medical condition “bone spurs” that provided a medical disqualification from the draft. Among other evidence, the doctor who committed the fraud’s daughters subsequently confirmed that their father often said he “provided the bone‑spur diagnosis as a courtesy to the Trumps and implied Trump may not actually have had the condition.”
Trump, who has reportedly called fallen soldiers “losers” and “suckers,” notably received five draft deferments for the Vietnam War during the 1960s, four routines for education while in college, and the last one, in 1968, for the bone spurs. When the president’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, testified before Congress in February 2019 he revealed how Trump had deliberately fabricated that he had bone spurs in his heels so he could avoid military service. Cohen said “Mr Trump claimed (his medical deferment) was because of a bone spur, but when I asked for medical records, he gave me none and said there was no surgery. He told me not to answer the specific questions by reporters but rather offer simply the fact that he received a medical deferment. He finished the conversation with the following comment: ‘You think I’m stupid, I wasn’t going to Vietnam.’”
Digging a bit deeper, one discovers that the four generations of the Trump family in the United States has never included a single member, and that includes Donald’s children, that has ever done military service either by being drafted or as a volunteer. Avoiding military service would be rather unremarkable but for the president’s apparent obsession with sending young Americans off to countries that they would not be able to find on a map to kill foreigners, either directly or by proxy, who do not in any way threaten the United States. When asked about the tragedy of the American soldiers who have been killed and wounded in attacking Iran he responded that “more will die…that’s the way it is.”
The past week’s Trump misadventures include two “war stories.” The first is the recent firing of the Secretary of the Navy John Phelan. Phelan was apparently fired because he has not moved forward expeditiously enough with the creation of the “Trump Class Battleships” which the president wants to see afloat and ready to intimidate the world by 2028. Trump boasted in a news conference in Florida a few days before Christmas that “They’ll be the fastest, the biggest and by far — 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built.” Trump has referred to the new navy as his “golden fleet” (note the obsession with gold) and he boasts how “I put a little more spirit in the hull. I want that ship to look gorgeous, you know.” Trump vows implausibly that his ships will be “the largest battleship[s] in the history of the world ever built” — [they] would be made in the United States with US steel… We’re going to restore America as a major shipbuilding power.”
There are a couple of things about the new warships beyond that they are only on order because the president wants them to bear his name as America threatens competitor nations when it projects its power worldwide. First of all, they are not needed as Iran has demonstrated how war at sea no longer relies on huge ships because those vessels are extremely vulnerable to missiles fired from ashore or from much cheaper small patrol boats or submarines. That is why the US Navy is staying a minimum of 400 miles off the coast of Iran as any closer is an invitation to destruction. Beyond that, the Trump battleships are incredibly expensive with the first one, if it is actually built in 2028, coming in at a projected $17 billion Navy budget for that year alone. They are a metaphor for the Trump administration in general, making them largely useless, vulnerable and a waste of money.
And to top it all off, US shipyards capable of building the capital ships are not exactly geared up to do so as a high priority, lacking both capacity and skilled workers. And in the realm of the president’s imagination, the new photo reconstructions of such a warship would be massive, weighing nearly 40,000 tons, and packed with new high-tech weapons, like “lasers, hypersonic missiles and electric rail guns, most of which are still in development and years from being deployed.” That means building them at all means that setting deadlines on their appearance like 2028 is not a reasonable objective but one that the president is insisting on, which is why Phelan had to go after sharp exchanges with both the president and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
Another Trumpean aspiration relates to how he ran for office calling for an end of pointless wars but seems to be doing the opposite since elected, stoking the fighting in Russia-Ukraine and funding and providing political cover for the atrocities being committed by Israel in Gaza and on the West Bank. And now there are Iran and Lebanon coming close on the heels of Israeli occupation of southern Syria. Trump, the level of whose intellect is only matched by his morality when it comes to killing people and returning civilizations to the “stone age,” is a multi-venue destroyer with conflicts going in the Middle East, Somalia, Venezuela while murdering more than a hundred fishermen in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. Cuba is next on the list and Trump boasts that Canada will be the 51st US state followed by Greenland at 52. While that is going on, the president will no doubt be dishing out punishment for the NATO members who have been reluctant to provide material support for his illegal war against Iran.
All of that heavy lifting certainly merits some kind of prize and Donald Trump, waiting on his expected upcoming Nobel Peace Prize and his opportunity to coerce the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) into giving him another medal to keep him sedated and avoid his making trouble during the upcoming World Cup, is dropping hints about his readiness to nominate himself for the United States of America’s highest military decoration, the Congressional Medal of Honor! For what it’s worth, the CMH normally recognizes a military service member who “distinguishes himself conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty.”
During a White House reception last July Trump considered the prospect for the medal, saying he deserved it “because his plane flew into Iraq on an unlit runway during a first-term trip to visit troops stationed in the country.” Earlier, in February, Trump had previously mentioned how he justified giving himself the Congressional Medal of Honor after the Iraq trip. He said “I flew to Iraq and was extremely brave. In fact, so brave I wanted to give myself the Congressional Medal of Honor. I said to my people: am I allowed to give myself the Congressional Medal of Honor?” He concluded “I’m going to test the law, I’m going to say… let’s give it a shot.”
I guess what I’m trying to say is that Donald Trump the warrior for peace is in reality Donald Trump the International Embarrassment, a man without scruples or values who apparently wants to make the world a better place by destroying it or handing it over to Israel, which would amount to the same thing. The question remains, even as the American people are apparently waking up to that fact, when will Congress realize the danger we are in and actually do something about it?
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