Opinion | How Trump Weaponized the Antiwar Platform

You mentioned JD Vance in the 2024 campaign. Vance ran that campaign very much articulating a view that Donald Trump was the antiwar candidate. Now, obviously, we are enmeshed in Iran. What happened? Well, it turns out that Donald Trump lies. That is one of the things that happened. But you’re right. I mean, both Vance and Trump in the months and especially the weeks before Election Day 2024 leaned in hard on this antiwar message. Trump was a pro-peace president. We were going to get out of these dumb, endless wars. That’s actually something he ran on in 2016 as well. If you go back every election since the end of the Cold War, starting with 1992, with the one exception of 2004, the more antiwar candidate has won. I’m not going to say that they won because they were antiwar, but I do think that is a very interesting set of data, which I think says, at the very least, that there is an audience for a much less militaristic vision of America’s role in the world. I mean, even Joe Biden, in 2020 he ran on a pledge to end the forever wars. Democrats just abandoned the anti lane and left it wide open for Trump. I said then, and I say now, obviously no one should believe Trump, but I do think he had at least the political intelligence to recognize that was an attractive message. And I think Democrats really need to understand that.