Trump ditches ‘America First’ to put the American Empire first

For all the trash he talked about them, Donald Trump seems hellbent on making Dick Cheney and John McCain proud.

With his latest illegal strikes on Iran, Trump the “peace president” has once again chosen to meddle abroad to distract from the fact his domestic policy agenda is failing the American people.

As Trump himself put it in 2012, “Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly-not skilled!”

After blowing up boats in the Caribbean and killing a bunch of people in Venezuela, it’s clear the president quite enjoys his power to end lives. The receipts go back years: some of his only vetoes as president in his first term were in response to congressional efforts to block his involvement in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. Also in his first term, civilian deaths in Afghanistan surged thanks to escalating airstrikes there on his orders.

Fortunately for Trump, Congress is now primarily a rubber-stamping jobs program for partisan hacks, so there’s no one stopping his abuse of power abroad.

He certainly had no problem noting “the lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties” and certainly gave even less thought maybe going through the motions of congressional authorization before gambling with American lives.

While Trump’s foreign policy adventurism may please the military industrial-complex and Benjamin Netanyahu, it’s not doing any good for the United States.

Trump decried the regime change wars of the past. But it turns out he was just envious.

Sal Rodriguez can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com