Trump’s ‘Chickenhawk’ Attack on His GOP Critics Is Dumb, but Not Evil

By Noah Rothman

Friday, November 01, 2024

 

Donald Trump has once again deployed an asinine attack against his detractors — one that was formerly a staple of Democratic rhetoric and doesn’t get any sharper when it comes out of Republican mouths. But we’re in the incandescent heat of the final days of a general election, and spectators to it demand partisan superlatives. Nothing can simply be stupid. It must be dangerous, inciting, and a reflection not just of the rottenness of the candidate’s soul but of the malignancy of his movement and all its works.

 

That’s roughly how Democratic loyalists responded to Trump’s latest jab at his most vociferous Republican critic, Liz Cheney. She is “a very dumb individual, very dumb,” Trump said. More to the point, “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there, with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it — you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

 

It’s hard to believe that even casual political observers have failed to encounter this line before, one of the more troglodytic examples of the familiar “chickenhawk” disparagement. And yet, according to Cheney’s defenders, Trump wasn’t saying that she would wilt in the face of real, life-threatening combat. He was actually saying that he wanted to put her before a “firing squad.”

 

It takes genuine intellectual dexterity to divine that meaning from Trump’s remarks. He went out of his way to make it clear that he was channeling the peacenik sentimentality common among his advanced generation. “You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh gee, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy,’” Trump said alongside Tucker Carlson. The reason Dick Cheney’s “repulsive little daughter” opposes Trump, the former president speculated, “is that she wanted to stay in Iraq, she wants — tough person, people get killed all over — she’s real tough, right?”

 

But Trump did stay in Iraq. He didn’t withdraw U.S. troops from the positions Barack Obama reintroduced them to following his disastrous pullout of American soldiers from the Middle East, nor did he withdraw U.S. advisers from Syria despite his stated desire to abandon America’s Kurdish allies. Trump is running against his own record — one that was engineered and implemented by loyal, lifelong Republicans possessed of a basic understanding of how deterrence works.

 

Trump generally deferred to those Republicans during his first term in the White House, but that has created a paradox for him today. Trump and his supporters love his first-term achievements, but they hate the architects of those achievements.

 

For example, in that same appearance, Trump also laid into John Bolton. “John Bolton was a real dope,” the former president said of his former national-security adviser. “If someone ever shot down a crappy little $15 drone he’d want to go with war with Russia.”

 

Here, Trump might have been referring to a real-world situation in which Iran shot down a multi-million-dollar surveillance drone over international waters — an attack to which Trump did not respond. That incitement was followed by a brazen and direct Iranian attack on the world’s largest petroleum-processing facility in Saudi Arabia. Again, Trump responded only by releasing American strategic-oil reserves to stabilize the market, and Iran was emboldened. Its proxies rained rockets and drones down on U.S. positions in Iraq — assaults that eventually resulted in the death of a U.S. contractor. To this, Trump finally approved a proportional response against the region’s Shiite militias, but proportionality didn’t do the trick. Only after Iran sponsored a mob assault on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad did Trump finally green-light a disproportionate response to Iranian provocations: the strike that neutralized Qasem Soleimani. And only then did Iran begin to send de-escalatory signals.

 

The point of this history lesson is to illustrate how deterrence is restored when it breaks down, and why it is so crucial to preserve a stable deterrent dynamic. That, not outright combat against America’s adversaries, is what Cheney and Republicans who share her sensibilities advocate. It is imbecilic to insist, as so many Republicans who have borrowed thoughtless Democratic calumnies do, that the West’s efforts to contain the conflicts in Europe and the Middle East (with a third looming in Asia) constitute aggression. They are merely a response to aggression — one that is designed to prevent the U.S. from being drawn into spiraling conflicts.

 

Republicans used to be able to recognize the inverted causality in the “chickenhawk” argument — an outlook that reserves far more hostility for the United States than its enemies and fails to comprehend the virtue of civilian leadership of the armed forces. But that recognition is inconvenient today, so logic must be dispensed with.

 

It is, however, rich to see Democratic partisans now bristle with offense at the appropriation of their erstwhile favorite insult. George W. Bush was once the preferred target of this sort of defamation. So, too, was Mitt Romney. Even John McCain, a war hero whose son served in the armed forces, was accused of wanting to send other families’ sons and daughters into combat for his own perverse pleasure.

 

These arguments don’t appeal to rationality. They are appeals to instinct with the goal of triggering a protective emotion that overcomes reason; like the recognition of the elementary fact that Americans are not engaged in the fighting that erupted across the globe amid Joe Biden’s efforts to pull the U.S. back from the world’s front lines and recalibrate our commitments to our allies.

 

You’re not supposed to think; you’re supposed to feel. It’s a dumb argument, but it’s not evil.