Voters fed up with foreign entanglements were justifiably repulsed by the Democrats, even if Trump and the Republicans are a sham
Last month in Black Mountain, North Carolina I toured one of the makeshift relief centers where, several weeks after Hurricane Helene hit, people were still regularly lining up for food, water, clothes, and other supplies. It was a disconcerting sight; a rural area with topography that few had reasonably foreseen would be susceptible to catastrophic flooding, and where people had barely begun to reassemble their lives in the weeks after the terrible storm.
One of the onsite volunteers put me on the phone with Tony Anderson, a 56-year-old man who subsists on disability payments from Social Security, and whose house had been rendered unlivable by flood-caused mold. Tony had become a daily patron of the relief center. He was once a manager for a multinational textile corporation called Springs Global, but the distribution center he worked at shut down approximately a decade ago. According to Tony, he never got a pension. Now, he told me, he was dealing with kidney disease and other ailments.
Somewhat surprisingly, Tony said he was satisfied with the government assistance he’d received in the aftermath of the storm, which ravaged so much of Western North Carolina. “FEMA’s done me pretty well,” he said. “They’ve sent me $3,600.” The agency put him up at a relatively comfortable hotel, where he’d be eligible to stay until at least the end of December. The mold had made his house, which his parents built in 1952, basically unsalvageable, and he didn’t have the money to relocate anywhere.
When I asked his opinion on the overall sufficiency of the government response to the storm, Tony said, “They ought to do a whole lot better for people around here. You know, they send all these hundreds of billions of dollars overseas all the time, but they don’t help the American people.”
This is a totally relatable and justifiable intuition. However one might perceive their own individual circumstances, it’s impossible to not absorb how the government chooses to allocate resources in the aggregate. And it’s just true that the United States, desperately clinging to its position as the world’s dominant power, continues to send extraordinary sums of money abroad — usually to fuel far-flung conflicts in which the average American would have no reason to perceive a personal stake, if not for the bullhorn of propaganda instructing them to be existentially invested in such wholesome enterprises as pulverizing the Gaza Strip or the Donbas.
Meanwhile, Democrats have been uniformly and dogmatically enthusiastic in their devotion to sending nearly $200 billion to Ukraine over the past two and a half years. Even if some of those monies do get spent on juicing domestic US military-industrial production, the ultimate destination of the armaments is still some bleak and alien battlefield in Eastern Europe. And the disbursements are typically packaged with comparably generous expenditures for quagmires in the Middle East, along with the region now euphemistically referred to in NatSec jargon as the “Indo-Pacific.”
When I asked Tony how he thought this allocation of resources would impact the outcome of the election, he said: “I think that people will be angry with the Democrats because they really misuse our funds. They really misuse taxpayer money.”
He added: “I think that, you know, if this all could change — that the country is a lot better than the way we’re being treated now. And that’s just exactly how I feel.”
I hardly had to ask him who he was voting for. It was the guy promising to Make America Great Again, Again, But Really This Time.
It was in no small part due to voters like Tony that Trump and the Republicans were swept back into power last week. I’m not going to say it was the decisive reason; US presidential elections are massive and infinitely multivariate events. Anyone claiming to have a singular explanation that captures the complete essence of the outcome is an overconfident windbag.
Even so, 4% of voters said their top issue was foreign policy, according to exit polls. That may seem like a small number comparatively speaking, but in a country as populous as the United States, it’s still something like 6-7 million voters. Elections are won at the margins; Trump won these foreign policy-motivated voters by 20 points, and that’s without factoring in the voters who might have chosen not to vote at all because of foreign policy, or who voted for a Third Party candidate, or who prioritize foreign policy to some degree, but not enough to cite it as their top issue. I don’t think anyone has to strain too hard to divine why Trump astonishingly won the city of Dearborn, Michigan.
Republicans, of course, are even more uniformly virulent than Democrats in their support for endless deployment of taxpayer resources to Israel, for use in the ongoing annihilation campaign in Gaza and Lebanon — and perhaps for a forthcoming annexation of the West Bank, as one of the most fanatical Israeli government ministers, Bezalel Smotrich, has excitedly indicated is next on the agenda in light of Trump’s victory. But where are the Democrats with any standing to interrogate this contradiction? Nowhere to be found — because in aggregate, they obviously do not have any such standing. Their best argument has been to melodramatically demand, in the name of “democracy,” that voters reinstall the same administration which has sent out these titanic sums.
Trump is nothing if not politically astute, and he played on similar themes during the 2016 campaign, accurately noting back then that the US had squandered something like $6 trillion in the Middle East over the preceding 15 years — at the expense of dedicating those resources for domestic needs like infrastructure and healthcare.
But then Trump got into power, and now with eight years of hindsight we have the luxury of examining what he actually did with the power he wielded. Despite fitful gestures suggesting a vague intent to extricate the US from foreign conflicts, he intensified US entanglements in the Middle East by, among other things, sending thousands more US troops to Saudi Arabia in a blinkered crusade to torment Iran. This fanatical anti-Iranian endeavor shows no signs of waning under a second administration. If anything, the opposite — Trump has been threatening to blow the whole of Iran to “smithereens.” Last week, a highly dubious and curiously timed DOJ indictment alleged that a duo of petty criminals in New York City were recruited by the Iranian government to assassinate Trump — providing additional fodder for any forthcoming reprisals. But Trump’s posture toward the Middle East has never been much of a mystery. As wrote Tulsi Gabbard in the ancient days of 2019:
President Trump is using the instruments of America’s military power for purposes that could only be described as old-style, naked imperialism: directing our troops to guard Syrian oil fields that don’t belong to us, with promises to take that oil and profit from it ….While Trump claims to want to stop “endless wars,” he has sent thousands more troops to Saudi Arabia — bringing us perilously close to a confrontation with Iran that would be so costly and disastrous, it would make the Iraq war look like a cakewalk. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
A year earlier, Gabbard had famously described Trump as “Saudi Arabia’s bitch,” but in her activities as a newly converted Trump 2024 campaign acolyte, I have yet to hear an explanation of how Trump’s profligate military and economic partnership with the Saudi royal family will differ materially in a second term. Because it sure looks poised to intensify, with Trump pledging to fulfill Biden’s unmet ambition of extending “security guarantees” to Saudi Arabia — effectively as a bribe for normalizing relations with Israel, while the Saudis pour billions into Jared Kushner’s investment fund and erect Trump-branded luxury towers in Jeddah. If it comes to pass, Trump will doubt proclaim to have brought “peace to the Middle East” by expanding the so-called “Abraham Accords” format to include another Gulf autocracy which had not been at war with Israel — all while completely freezing out the Palestinians, whose unremitting occupied status remains the core reason why “peace in the Middle East” has not been obtained.
During her 2020 campaign, Gabbard even accused Trump of intolerable complicity in what she called Saudi Arabia’s “genocidal” war on Yemen. She therefore joins Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez in having endorsed and campaigned for presidential candidates whom they had previously denounced as culpable for “genocide.” Either the term “genocide” does not actually carry the intense moral weight as popularly assumed, or both women were perfectly willing to shed their purported convictions in the name of political opportunism and personal advancement. Whichever the case, it’s hard to see how it reflects positively on either of them.
When I was in the Asheville, NC area, the water was basically still non-potable, with signs everywhere warning people not to drink it. Some residents refused to even shower in it. People like Tony were everywhere, disenchanted with the overall priorities of the government — including its unshakeable determination to dump money into war zones — and understandably primed to take out their frustration on the incumbent party. Whatever the (extremely doubtful) ability or intent of Trump to redress this grievance, the sentiment is still widespread and potent, and ripe for the political taking.
Trump has already named Elise Stefanik his next UN Ambassador. If anyone can identify how this person is substantively distinguishable from Nikki Haley, a previous occupant of that role in Trump’s first Administration, or even from Liz Cheney — now MAGA’s favorite piñata — I’m all ears. Because Stefanik has aggressively denounced the Biden Administration for supplying insufficient armaments to both Israel and Ukraine. She rose through the ranks of the very same DC Think Tanks that MAGA followers now putatively decry as “neocon.” She even worked for George W. Bush. The only appreciable difference between Stefanik and Haley/Cheney is Elise’s steadfast sycophancy to Trump, which she has now spent several years feverishly cultivating.
The same goes for Mike Waltz, another arch-interventionist Congressman and former Dick Cheney staffer who Trump has just named as National Security Advisor. And if the apparent nomination of Marco Rubio for Secretary of State is confirmed, Trump will be entering his second Administration with arguably the most zealously interventionist administration in decades.
You might think at least one of the brain-geniuses in the Democratic consultant class would have the foresight to point out the political vulnerability of Trump once again stuffing his administration with war-fevered zealots — but they collectively forfeited that argument, choosing instead to parade around with Liz Cheney and micro-target Nikki Haley’s primary voters in the Wisconsin suburbs.
And so voters exhausted with the endless foreign misadventures obviously had no plausible option in the Democrats. It’s no surprise, then, that Trump once again became the preferred option by default — even though it’s only taken a few days to signal that option was once again tragically shambolic.
Great write up. Just one note on this line: "It was a disconcerting sight; a rural area with topography that few had reasonably foreseen would be susceptible to catastrophic flooding..." This area was absolutely wiped off the map just over a hundred years ago by a hurricane that caused catastrophic flooding. We just have short memories. https://www.ourstate.com/flood-of-1916/
One must wonder who on Trump's X-Men team is giving him advice on choosing his foreign policy staff? What does Tulsi Gabbard have to say about his restaffing his administration with more stale, recycled swamp creatures?