Contrary to popular belief, goldfish do retain long-term memories. The same can’t be said of Peter Baker:
What the Donald Trump of 2016 would think of the Donald Trump of 2026 will never be known. But they are starkly different figures when it comes to overseas intervention. A decade after propelling himself to the highest office by promising to focus on “America first,” Mr. Trump has become increasingly willing to assert power overseas.
As I wrote during the 2024 campaign, you just had to look at Trump’s first term to know how he’d use his war powers in a second. Worse, in fact, since in the interim, he purged anyone who might suggest the barest modicum of restraint. (To wit: In today’s darkest moment of comedy so far, some of the strongest words of warning against Trump’s impulsive and unstrategic attack on Iran are coming from John fucking Bolton, the ex-Trump and Bush adviser who has arguably done more to push us into a war with Iran than anyone since Kermit Roosevelt.)
He then replaced them with unhinged, inexperienced toadies like the Fox News weekend host (now Defense Secretary). Also see the Florida attorney general he once openly bribed, who then became a highly paid lobbyist for Qatar—an Arabian/Persian Gulf state that is home to a major U.S. base and is now getting pulled into the war, possibly as a belligerent, as it spreads across the Middle East.
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Baker isn’t alone, of course. People from all over the spectrum did yeoman’s work to sell the lie that Trump-Vance was the “pro-peace ticket.” I’m thinking of a whole rogue’s gallery of names, from Tucker Carlson to PayPal mafioso-turned-influencer David Sacks to ex-Democrats Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., both of whom were rewarded with cabinet posts. If you’d forgotten, then-Senator J.D. Vance catapulted to the top of the post-Pence Veepstakes with a Wall Street Journal op-ed subtitled, “[Trump] has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t note the Pulitzer Prize-sharing buffoon Glenn Greenwald, who spent the last decade screeching that the “energy behind opposing American interventionism — American wars — is much more on the populist right than the populist left,” promoting the above-mentioned charlatans, and asking: “George Bush and Dick Cheney started new Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama started new Wars in Libya and Yemen. What new wars did Donald Trump start? What new wars did Trump start [in his first term]!?”1
The answer was none, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Remember: in his first term, Trump unilaterally pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal (which, as nuclear researcher Cheryl Rofer again notes this week, had been working) — the key step that set up one of the pretexts for his attack. In January 2020, he ordered the assassination of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani, which could have easily triggered the Iran War then and there. He notoriously staged disastrous raids in Yemen and Niger, played nuclear chicken with Kim Jong Un in North Korea, and escalated all four of the wars he inherited: Afghanistan/Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and the two-continent war against the so-called Islamic State.2
This war is extremely unpopular, with just 27% of respondents to a snap Reuters/Ipsos poll — including just 55% of Republicans! — saying they approved of the attack. And of course it is: Trump and his cronies, whose corruption is matched only by their indolence, didn’t even try to manufacture consent for it. When George W. Bush, rest his soul3, lied our way back into Iraq, he at least had the decency to make one of his most notorious lies about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent nuclear program a key element of his 2003 State of the Union address, so we could all at least know what it was, debate, and then ultimately debunk it. Trump had the exact same stage, at almost the exact same time on the war-of-choice calendar, last week. And all he could manage by way of a lie was to say: “My preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy.” Then he went back to slasher porn and baiting Democrats.
He did not bother to try to wrangle a congressional authorization for the use of military force — the latter-day substitute for the Article I “Declare War” clause. And forget about taking a dog-and-pony show to the U.N. Security Council to obtain authorization for the strikes, as required by the fundamental charter to which the U.S. remains a signatory. Again, Bush did that — sending Secretary of State Colin Powell to humiliate himself in the most notorious moment of his career — and then just ignored them when they refused to go along. This time, the Republicans just cut out the middleman.
Trump’s dwindling population of defenders is left spinning the Excuse Wheel: “it isn’t really a war” (OK: define “war”), “it won’t last long” (wanna bet), “it’s self-defense” (even the Pentagon isn’t bothering with that one), “he had no choice” (it’s definitionally a war of choice.) His characteristic refusal to settle on a rationale means that supplicants must simultaneously assert that Mr. Trump is telling the truth when he insists he heroically destroyed the Iranian nuclear program last year and also that the mullahs were (or still are?) a week away from making a nuke. They have to believe that Mr. Trump is heroically standing up for benighted protesters there, while jailing, killing, and deporting dissidents here.4 They have to celebrate a war of regime change that, as in Venezuela, to date has failed to change, or even offered a roadmap toward changing, the regime.
They have to argue that “America First” — a slogan that for 170 years, since it was debuted by the xenophobic American or Know-Nothing Party, has stood for isolation from foreign wars, foreign immigration, and foreign trade — actually means the opposite of what it says: that following the governments of Israel and Saudi Arabia into an unnecessary foreign entanglement, if not quagmire, is “America First” if the president says so.5
I don’t take much solace from the fact that it isn’t going to work — politically, if not militarily. (Though likely both.) This is, as a friend of The Racket Spencer Ackerman argues, and my 2022 book’s subtitle presaged, “dying empire behavior.” And empires, like certain aforementioned Substackers, do not learn from or atone for their mistakes. Instead, they tend to double down after their failures and shift blame — to immigrants, the opposition, or, that old crowd favorite, the Jews.
People view damage to shops and residences in the aftermath of an airstrike on March 2, 2026, in Tehran, Iran. (Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)
1 Partial credit to Glenn for belatedly realizing he was lied to … again. Reduced to the bare minimum because of his reflex to pontificate as if he was right all along, instead of actually taking the next step and doing any kind of introspection into why he has constantly fallen for this stuff.
2 Also noted in my 2024 piece: In Afghanistan, Trump ordered U.S. warplanes to drop record numbers of bombs, not only tripling civilian deaths but killing more civilians than the Taliban. He also relaxed rules on both drone and commando strikes, including revoking reporting requirements on civilian casualties. In 2019, he vetoed a congressional war powers resolution that would have ended U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led war against the Houthis. A few months later, he traveled to Riyadh, where he presented to the Saudis an arms package worth $110 billion. The strategic purpose of the weapons transfers was to draw Saudi Arabia closer to the United States and Israel in the then-simmering regional proxy war with … Iran.
Also, not for nothing, but for all of Biden’s arming of Ukrainian defense and funding Israel’s genocide in Gaza, he didn’t start any new wars either.
3 Correction: I am reliably informed that he is just socially dead.
4 The line on this one is that protesters they like are brave and the ones they don’t like are “paid” — by whom, to do what, and why they accept remain eternally unanswered questions.
5 Though worth noting that it’s long been a hypocritical slogan. One of the most notable uses of it was by Woodrow Wilson in his 1916 reelection campaign. He was eliding the fact that he had plunged the U.S. into several wars in his first term (most notably Mexico and Haiti) and followed it up by entering the world war he had run on keeping Americans out of. He then embarked on a foreign policy so globally minded that “Wilsonian” came to mean the epitome of liberal interventionism — leading Republicans to run against his legacy in the 1920 campaign under the slogan … America First.
Also, many of the most notorious America Firsters — the pre-World War II America First Committee — were extremely pro-foreign-entanglement, as long as the government they were allying with was the Nazis.