What Trump Really Said About Liz Cheney
Donald Trump didn’t suggest that somebody should take a gun and try firing at Liz Cheney. He said she should try being on the battlefield and getting fired at (at 7:30), which is a different idea. His words to Tucker Carlson: “The reason she doesn’t like me is that she wanted to stay in Iraq. She wanted to stay… She’s real tough, right? They’re not the tough people” and “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Okay, let’s see how she feels about it when the guns are trained on her face. They’re all warhawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh gee, well, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’” The idea isn’t that Cheney needs execution, just that she wouldn’t be so tough if she had to put her body on the line.
Trump really does hate the Iraq War. He doesn’t have a lot of firmly-held policy beliefs, but he has this one. He arrived at it like any other casual news consumer: by watching the evidence mount up year by year on TV. Pre-invasion, he was ambivalent, ready to be dragged along but that’s it (Trump, September 2002, on supporting the war: “Yeah, I guesss… so”). During the war’s choppy first weeks he was a critic. He cheered up during the smoother month or so that followed. Then came the bad news, years of it. Like many other voters, he decided he didn’t like the war at all. By the time he ran for president, the GOP base had no use for the war either. In February 2016, Trump stood on a debate stage in South Carolina and said the Bush administration had lied us into Iraq. Members of the party old guard said service families wouldn’t forgive talk like that. Instead the primary ended Jeb Bush’s career.
As Trump told Carlson last week, the war was expensive (“nine trillion, trillion with a t, not even with a b”), it was murderous (“what the hell did we get, other than lots of dead people, including our people”), and it was counter-strategic (“all of a sudden, Iran has the whole Middle East to itself”). I don’t sign off on all of Trump’s facts, or even his implicit objection to killing Arab civilians. Given what he let the military do during the war with Isis, he could try having bombs fall atop him while Liz Cheney tries getting shot at. But overall he means what he says, especially when he vents about not being able to loot the countries where we intervened: “It used to be, you go to war, to the victor belong the spoils, right? In other words, if you beat a country, you own that country, you take the oil… We bombed the whole Middle East and then we left. What did we get? We got nothing.”
Twenty years ago Republican voters were mad because foreigners didn’t buy America’s right and duty to kick ass whenever and wherever it wanted. Now they’re mad because the ass-kicking didn’t work out. It’s tempting to say they learned nothing and forgot nothing, but I’d say the problem is more this: Iraq crippled Republican policymakers’ war-making capabilities without making Republicans any more sensible or humane.
—Follow C.T. May on Twitter: @CTMay3