Noxious Joe leaves Trump with the premixed ingredients of World War III and he’s heated the oven . . .

By Robert Gore - December 18, 2024

Donald Trump has surely earned a place among history’s preeminent salesmen. The audacity of his hope was far greater than that of the quite conventional politician who preceded him in office. Billionaire businessman Trump ignored the punditry who dismissed his first candidacy, upended traditional political totems, went around the hostile mainstream media via social and alternative media, convinced millions that he was just the hand grenade Washington needed, survived two assassination attempts, and has now won his third presidential election.

Trump was born in 1946, during the four-year period, 1945 to 1949, when the U.S. was the sole superpower, with exclusive possession of nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949, and the U.S. was no longer the unrivaled master of the whole planet. Instead, it became the Leader of the Free World, a confederated empire. During the ensuing Cold War, the government employed propaganda, intelligence, skullduggery, and military might against Soviet satellites, nonaligned nations, and its own Free World allies to keep the world running the way it thought it should be run.

Trump was eligible for the draft in the middle of the Vietnam War, but like so many prominent proponents of empire, he avoided it. That’s too bad, because maybe if he had seen his buddies blown apart, villages and their inhabitants incinerated, or taken a bullet or shrapnel himself—perhaps came back without a leg—he might have questioned the whole notion of imperial greatness. Instead, he reveres the military and is always careful to show the expected respect to those individual service members, no longer conscripted, he could potentially order to their deaths.

He avoided not just Vietnam’s bullets and bombs, but its larger lessons. Invasion is the easy part; the problems begin with occupation. The home team has most of the advantages—local knowledge, support from the citizenry, and the ability to wage asymmetric warfare and espionage—particularly if it’s receiving overt or covert outside assistance.

It would be charitable, but woefully incorrect, to say . . .

[SNIP]