Orange Peace

Is Donald Trump A Racist, Misogynistic, Ethnic Cleansing, Climate Denying Opponent Of War?

In January 1961, in his farewell address, US president Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that, as a result of the Second World War and the ensuing Cold War, the United States had ‘been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions’.

But the consequences had not been foreseen:

‘This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience… Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications… In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

‘We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.’

Over the subsequent decades, the deadly potential of this misplaced power has been fully realised, not just in the United States but throughout the West.

Leading US-UK and other Western political parties, along with most corporate media, are now packed with politicians and journalists clearly influenced by, or actively serving, this military-industrial agenda.

It is the influence of this war machine that causes virtually every media organisation to support virtually every US-UK war of aggression in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. It seeks out or stokes lucrative bloodbaths in Ukraine and Gaza. It smears and denounces anyone calling for non-violent alternatives as ‘useful idiots’, de facto ‘traitors’, siding with Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi, Assad and Putin.

When the military-industrial complex has an Official Enemy in its sights, the propaganda message is hammered home to an extent that makes a mockery of all claims to independent, impartial reporting. This BBC website homepage from 18 March 2024 on Putin’s re-election as Russian president is a prime example.

The crazed propaganda blitz across all ‘mainstream’ media smearing then Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as an antisemite was, at least in part, a function of the power Eisenhower described. Corbyn was not despised by the political and media allies of the military-industrial complex because he is an antisemite, a transparently fake claim. He was despised because he opposes wars of aggression.

Remarkably, given that they stand at opposite ends of the political spectrum, there are parallels between this media treatment of Corbyn and that afforded to US president Donald Trump.

Trump is rejected by many ordinary folk on the grounds that he is racist, misogynistic, promotes ethnic cleansing in Gaza and is catastrophically ill-informed on climate collapse. But he is despised by the same interests that targeted Corbyn because he views war as a waste of money that could be more profitably invested elsewhere. This is not a Trumpian echo of Gandhi’s principled, satyagraha ethic of non-violence. Rather, if ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’, Trump’s anti-war stance is the continuation of capitalism by other means.

Thus, on the West’s ‘regime change’ efforts in Syria, Trump tweeted bluntly in 2013:

‘We should stay the hell out of Syria, the “rebels” are just as bad as the current regime. WHAT WILL WE GET FOR OUR LIVES AND $ BILLIONS? ZERO’

In the same year, he also said:

‘Remember, all these “freedom fighters” in Syria want to fly planes into our buildings.’

In July 2017, the Washington Post reported:

‘President Trump has decided to end the CIA’s covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad…’

In December 2018, Trump announced that he would withdraw all of the two thousand US troops deployed in Syria. The US war on Syria was later revived under president Biden, and Syrian president Assad was overthrown last December.

In 2020, during Trump’s first presidency, the US and the Taliban signed an ‘agreement for bringing peace’ to Afghanistan after nearly two decades of conflict, eliciting widespread criticism. Trump had earlier explained his rationale:

‘Well, I’m the one that talks about these wars that are 19 years (long), and people are just there. And don’t kid yourself, you do have a military-industrial complex. They do like war.

‘I said, I want to bring our troops back home – the place went crazy. They want to keep… you have people here in Washington, they never want to leave. I said, you know what I’ll do, I’ll leave a couple hundred soldiers behind, but if it was up to them, they’d bring thousands of soldiers in.

‘Someday people will explain it, but you do have a group, and they call it the military-industrial complex.

‘They never want to leave; they always want to fight. No. I don’t want to fight, but you do have situations like Iran. You can’t let them have nuclear weapons. You just can’t let that happen.’

As this indicates, we need to immediately remind ourselves that Trump has been willing to threaten Iran with annihilation. In 2019, he said:

‘If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!’

Trump has also been credited with playing a lead role in achieving a ceasefire in Gaza. A January 13 report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz was headlined:

‘Trump’s Mideast Envoy Forced Netanyahu to Accept a Gaza Plan He Repeatedly Rejected’

The summary:

‘Israeli sources say that the involvement of the incoming U.S. administration, led by Trump’s aggressive Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, revived hostage talks with Hamas.’

On the other hand, again, Trump has grotesquely threatened to ‘clean out’ the Palestinians from their homeland in Gaza, saying:

‘You’re talking about a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing.’

If that happened, it would be a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.

Trump recently made this astonishing statement:

‘One of the first meetings I want to have is with president Xi of China, president Putin of Russia. And I want to say, let’s cut our military budget in half.’

Journalist Glenn Greenwald commented:

‘The fact that he wants to do this in conjunction with China and Russia after years of extremely bellicose rhetoric about the US-Chinese relationship is also very promising, given that it is a sign that Trump wants to improve relations and work diplomatically where possible – not only with the largest nuclear-armed state, which is Russia, but a major nuclear power in China, as well. Something that no Democrat would ever even have hinted at or alluded to – the rhetoric about China has been extremely hawkish for a long time.’

Yes, there is every reason to be sceptical about what Trump says, but it is highly positive, and should certainly be headline news, that a US president is even putting these ideas into the public domain. The headline could have been:

‘Trump Calls For A 50% Slash In Military Spending And A New Era Of Peace’

But Trump’s talk of slashing military budgets in half was mentioned only in passing, if at all. We have been unable to find any mention on the BBC website.

Trump also said recently:

‘We were talking about de-nuking; president Putin and I agreed we are going to do it in a very big way.

‘There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many you could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over…

‘And we’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually hopefully much more productive.’

This is not just hot air; it has real-world consequences. In the wake of Trump’s comments, ‘defence’ stocks quickly fell. Shares of Lockheed Martin dropped 1.6%, Northrop Grumman sank 3.4% and General Dynamics lost 2.1%.

As he started negotiations with Russia in Saudi Arabia to end the Ukraine war this month, Trump commented on social media:

‘It is time to stop this ridiculous War, where there has been massive, and totally unnecessary, DEATH and DESTRUCTION. God bless the people of Russia and Ukraine!’

When a US president calls for money to be diverted away from unnecessary wars to more productive ends allegedly benefiting the American people, it naturally has an impact on public opinion, especially amongst those who voted for him. Opinion polls suggest that US public support for the Ukraine war has plummeted. The percentage of people arguing that the US is doing too much to help Ukraine is up six-fold from 7 per cent in February 2022 to 41 per cent now. Among Republicans, the figure is 62 per cent. Some 78 per cent say they support a negotiated peace deal, with only 16 per cent opposing.

American economist and political analyst Jeffrey Sachs commented to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! on the US-Russia peace negotiations:

‘What’s happening in Saudi Arabia is potentially very good news. It could mean the end of a war in which perhaps a million Ukrainians have died or been wounded gravely up until now. This is a war that never should have happened.’

Sachs added:

‘So, my bottom line, Amy, is that while the Trump administration does some pretty weird things… the Trump administration, for the first time, is telling the truth about the fundamental causes of this war and how it can end. And that is the best news possible for Ukraine, first and foremost, and for the United States, for Russia and for the world, that peace could come to Ukraine very, very shortly.’

At time of writing, reports suggest that ‘a Ukraine-Russia truce could be weeks away after talks with Trump’.

Trump has also appointed to key positions people who have talked against war.

All 18 US intelligence agencies, including the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, now report directly to Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence. Gabbard has argued that ‘foreign policy is inseparable from domestic policy’ and ending ‘regime change wars’ is the best way to pay for other things Americans need. Gabbard has called for a reduction in military interventionism, lambasting the neocon war machine for US involvement in ‘counterproductive, wasteful regime change wars’. In 2019, Gabbard said:

‘Today, our freedoms and democracy are being threatened by media giants ruled by corporate interests who are in the pocket of the establishment war machine. When journalism is deployed as a weapon against those who call for peace, it threatens our democracy as it seeks to silence debate and dissent…’

Last year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, now US secretary of health and human services, said that he wants to ‘end the proxy wars, bombing campaigns, covert operations, coups, paramilitaries, and everything else that has become so normal most people don’t know what’s happening’.

These are previously unthinkable comments from a senior US politician.

Kennedy has argued that ‘the Democratic Party became the party of war… I attribute that directly to President Biden.’ Kennedy’s radical position on Ukraine is very clear in this video interview.

Last November, Elon Musk, Trump’s head of department of government efficiency, actually shared a video on X in which Jeffrey Sachs argued that the US and NATO were responsible for provoking the war in Ukraine.

Vice-president J.D. Vance and secretary of state Marco Rubio have also both talked down tensions with Russia and China, with Rubio emphasising that Trump is ‘seeking to promote peace in the world, not start wars, but end them’.

‘Chilling’ Peace Talks – The Media Response

After decades spent propagandising for US-UK wars, the BBC is working overtime to damn Trump’s efforts to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war. A typical BBC headline read:

‘Putin would be in Kyiv if Trump had been president when war started, says ex-Biden adviser’

Another BBC report was headlined:

‘Putin “doesn’t want to give up anything” for peace – former Nato commander’

A full-on propaganda piece by the BBC’s International Editor Jeremy Bowen was titled:

‘Three years on, Ukraine’s extinction nightmare has returned’

Bowen accused Trump of ‘outright lies about the war that echo the views of President Putin… The biggest lie Trump has told is that Ukraine started the war.’

Ordinarily unthinkable language for a BBC reporter commenting on a US president.

BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner won the prize for most apocalyptic headline:

‘Leaders set for key security meeting as “old” world order at risk of crumbling’

This being, of course, the same ‘world order’ that has continued supplying bombs and other support to Israel as it commits genocide in Gaza. A separate piece by Gardner was headlined:

‘A chilling wake-up call for Europe’

Gardner explained:

‘After decades of relying on the US as the backstop for its defence the message from the White House to Europe is clear: you can no longer take that for granted, you now need to step up and look after your own security.’

The BBC headlined former prime minister Sir John Major’s comments:

‘US isolation threatens global democracy, warns Major’

Major said of the Russians:

‘And if they were to succeed with their venture in Ukraine, no doubt they’d be elsewhere before too long.’

In the green corner on the BBC’s Question Time programme, chairborne war hawk George Monbiot commented on the peace talks:

‘That says to Putin, “Right, Moldova next!” Who knows? Romania maybe, Poland. “Let’s have a look at those Baltic states, they look pretty juicy.”’

‘So’, Monbiot was asked, ‘just keep going’, just keep fighting?

‘Yes, yes!’

Monbiot even commented:

‘Every generation has its Chamberlains.’

Readers will need to pinch themselves to recall that over the last three years, especially last year, highly credible commentators have been urgently calling for peace negotiations on the grounds that US-Russian confrontation in Ukraine could all too easily slide into a terminal nuclear apocalypse.

Just last month, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced the Doomsday Clock from 90 seconds to 89 seconds to midnight — the closest it has ever been to catastrophe. The Bulletin commented:

‘In regard to nuclear risk, the war in Ukraine, now in its third year, looms over the world; the conflict could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation.’

This sentiment simply does not exist for BBC and most other ‘mainstream’ journalists.

Peter Hitchens is a virtually lone voice, writing in (of all places) the Mail on Sunday:

‘Whatever has come over the leaders of Europe, jostling to keep the Ukraine war going when it might at last be ending? This moronic, needless conflict has done this continent nothing but harm…

‘I greatly dislike Donald Trump, and think some of his public statements actively crazy, but if he is prepared to dump the Wolfowitz doctrine and stop trying to make war in Europe, I’m prepared to give him some credit.’

But it is not just the leaders; it is the great mass of Hitchens’ colleagues in the ‘free press’.

Sachs said it best:

‘Could someone in NATO stop talking, FOR GOD’S SAKE! about more war?!’

Conclusion – In The Pocket

It reads like something out of science fiction to say it, but Tulsi Gabbard, the US director of national intelligence, was basically right, ‘media giants ruled by corporate interests… are in the pocket of the establishment war machine’.

The journalists cited above are not all stooges of power, of course; some are simply favoured and promoted because they believe the right thoughts.

Much as we might disagree with him on virtually everything else, it matters when Trump says of Ukraine:

‘And I’ve been watching these people being killed at levels that you’ve rarely seen… not even close… since the Second World War, and I’m very disappointed.’

It matters because it highlights how almost no-one in our brutalised, pocketed media is discussing this appalling loss of life as a desperately urgent reason for ending it.

Outliers like Hitchens aside, where are the human beings emphasising that an end to the Ukraine war would be wonderful, that a 50 per cent cut in military spending and an associated thaw in relations between the US, China and Russia, would be an almost undreamed of step towards a more peaceful, sane world?

It is deeply significant that ‘mainstream’ media which ordinarily bow low at the feet of US presidential power are either ignoring or bitterly attacking Trump’s calls for de-nuking, conventional disarmament and peace, and it is no accident.

The truth being revealed is that UK state-corporate media do not simply defer to US presidential power; they defer to the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about and of which they are very much a part.

DE