Some of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters aren’t entirely thrilled by his decision to strike Syria in retaliation for the use of chemical weapons for the second time in his Presidency:
Some of President Donald Trump’s staunchest backers tore into his decision to attack Syria late Friday night, arguing it was unnecessary, reactionary and even Clinton-esque.
In tweet storms and video responses, they compared Trump’s decision to attack Syrian targets to actions taken by President George W. Bush or a hypothetical President Hillary Clinton.
“We lost. War machine bombs syria. No evidence Assad did it. Sad warmongers hijacking our nation,” tweeted conservative author and radio host Michael Savage. Savage also posted a video discussing the missile strikes, tearing into Trump’s decision.
There was a clear sense of disappointment among a certain strand of Trump supporter as the president announced a “precision strike” against the regime of Bashar Assad on Friday in response to a suspected chemical weapons attack last week.
The anguish came from supporters who latched on to Trump’s “America first” promise during the campaign. They argued that Trump’s decision undermined his promise to disentangle the U.S. from global conflicts, saying it reeked of the same old, same old.
“Donald Bush,” tweeted Mike Cernovich, a conservative author and once a staunch supporter of Trump.
“Congratulations to the Trump administration for adopting the same failed foreign policy and ignoring of the constitution as the last two administrations,” tweeted Doug Stafford, a strategist for Sen. Rand Paul’s RANDPAC.
Conservative author Ann Coulter retweeted a series of people questioning military action in Syria — as well as past tweets from Trump himself. Before his presidential bid, Trump argued former President Barack Obama would be foolish to take any action in Syria.
Coulter also quoted a news story about former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe promising he could beat Trump if he ran against him and tweeted, “You might – if you promised no more “stupid wars.””
As a preliminary matter, one has to wonder what exactly it was these people were expecting. From the time he was a candidate and stretching back long before that, Donald Trump has clearly demonstrated that he’s a man of no fixed principles. Back in the eighties and a good part of the early to mid-90s he came across as a moderately conservative Republican, albeit one with decidedly Democratic views when it came to issues such as trade and overseas investment. During the late 90s he seemed to have slipped into some version of a Ross Perot-like centrism and in 2000 even briefly flirted with the idea of running as a Presidential candidate under the banner of what was left of the Reform Party that grew out of Perot’s campaigns in 1992 and 1996. During the George W. Bush years, he drifted over into the Democratic camp or at least became a harsh critic of the Bush Administration in its later years. Finally, when the Obama Era rolled around he was originally quite supportive of the new President only to turn into a harsh critic to the point where he was questioning whether the President was even born in the United States.
All of that seemed to be forgotten once Trump became a candidate, of course. When Trump the candidate began running on a platform that played into themes ranging from disdain for immigrants legal and illegal and open contempt for the media and the Rule of Law, the crowds began to swell and people such as Ann Coulter and others quickly rallied to his side apparently convinced that this latest iteration of the Trump persona was any more genuine than the others that we’ve seen over the years. The fact that he had said something different in the past hardly mattered as long as he was saying the “right things” now.
The whole time this was happening, of course, those of us opposed to Trump we’re saying that Trump could not be trusted to keep to his word and that he’d walk back all or part of his campaign rhetoric once he became President, and that’s exactly what has happened. The best example of that, of course, can be seen with respect to the so-called border wall. On the campaign trail, the President claimed that not only would the wall be built, but that it would be built immediately and, of course, that Mexico would pay for it. More than a year into the Trump Administration, we’re at the point where none of the wall has been built, or small amounts of money have been authorized for border protection, and the Trump Administration has taken to claiming credit for a reconstruction project begun under the Obama Administration on fencing that is placed along certain parts of the border. And, oh yeah, Mexico isn’t paying for any of it.
Given all of that, is it really a surprise that Trump is drifting away from the anti-interventionist rhetoric that he ran on during the campaign? Apparently it is, at least to Trump supporters. One wonders when they’ll finally learn their lesson.
