The delusion of ‘Donald the Dove’ has been blown to bits
America’s malignant child-president has wanted to bomb Iran for decades, but the dangerous myth of an anti-war Trump has persisted
One of the most destructive myths in American politics was blown to smithereens Saturday night in Iran: the notion that Donald Trump is “anti-war.” This has never been the case, but unfortunately, far too many people believed otherwise.
While he hates diplomacy and chafes at international institutions, Trump is not an isolationist. Just the opposite is true. He loves making alliances and speaking with foreign dictators like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán. No U.S. president in modern history has meddled so flagrantly in foreign elections to boost ideological allies. Thankfully, Trump-inspired candidates like those promoted by Alternative for Germany or Canada’s Conservative Party have gone down in flames since his return to the White House. But make no mistake: while Trump scorns international law and human rights, his persistent attempts to bond with dictators make him more of a political globalist than any of his predecessors.
The evidence is also overwhelming that Trump has never been anti-war. He supported George W. Bush’s catastrophic invasion of Iraq—until it became unpopular, at which point he simply lied and claimed he had always opposed it. This pattern of opportunistic revisionism should have been a red flag, but many chose to believe in the mirage of Trump the peacemaker.
Now it is true that Trump has been very willing to condemn his predecessors for their foreign military entanglements. But when Trump criticized Obama’s and Bush’s foreign wars, progressive observers understood what others missed: he wasn’t speaking from principle but from pure political calculation. He knew anti-war sentiment was popular, so he mouthed the words.
Trump’s 2019 State of the Union Address was one of many speeches he gave in which he pretended to be anti-war: “As a candidate for president, I loudly pledged a new approach. Great nations do not fight endless wars.”
But Trump never believed in the cause of peace—or of anything else beyond self-aggrandizement. The truth is that Donald Trump is not smart enough to have an ideology. His mind is a fetid rat’s nest of conspiracy theories, hairspray, and stimulants. He criticized literally everything the Bushes, Obama, and Biden did, but some people cherry-picked only his foreign policy condemnations and built an entire fantasy around “Donald the Dove,” as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd infamously described him.
It’s enormously frustrating to see because in so many ways, Trump is like a malicious and bloated version of Chauncey Gardiner from “Being There”—he parrots words from anyone around him, leading people to project their own beliefs onto him. The difference is that Hal Ashby’s character was innocent and well-meaning, while Trump is neither.
His only genuine conviction is grabbing as much for himself as possible. Along the way, he’ll mouth whatever he thinks sounds smart or popular, but at the end of the day, he does what his minders tell him to do. Parker Molloy described the situation well in a 2020 column: “The statements that would make him a ‘dove’ came from the teleprompter and were little more than platitudes aimed at connecting with war-weary voters.”
Beneath the poll-tested speeches and scripted language, Trump has long harbored a fixation with projecting American military force, particularly against Muslim nations. And in his second term, with the comparatively saner voices gone, he’s finally acting on it. During his first term, impulses like invading Greenland, stealing the Panama Canal, or using the military against Americans were stymied by advisers who rightly regarded such policies as authoritarian madness—including bombing campaigns against Iran that he and top security adviser John Bolton fantasized about for years.
In his second term, however, the White House is being run by extremists like Stephen Miller and Russ Vought, who not only indulge Trump’s delusions but advance their own, which he is only too happy to adopt. Then there’s Erik Kurilla, the belligerent general now heading U.S. Central Command. Trump also listens to advisers like Mike Huckabee—now the U.S. Ambassador to Israel—who tell him that Jesus wants him to bomb Iran. It’s a siren song Trump is more than happy to hear.
The one area where Trump has attempted to operate independently has been his tariff obsession—a pathetic and damaging endeavor that has turned him into a global punchline. Every single one of his tariff schemes has ended in humiliating failure, forcing quiet retreats. Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO) because Trump Has No Coherent Thoughts. All he has are “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas,” as Lionel Trilling famously described reactionary thinking.
Aside from his fixation with tariffs, Trump’s appetite for bombing Iran has been one of the few constants in his political career. And on this issue, he has full support from his senior minders. The “stable genius” president has followed a consistent pattern of petulance and weak-minded deferral to Kurilla and other U.S. staffers—and also to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Not only is Netanyahu aligned with Trump’s religious-right enablers, but he is essentially a smarter, more strategic version of Trump. Both men are unprincipled, opportunistic, and obsessed with targeting Shia Muslims.
While genuine isolationists like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) are feeling jilted by Trump, Israel shills like Mark Levin have been entirely correct in claiming they are speaking to Trump’s expressed desires. Ill-informed libertarians and lazy pundits bought into the Chauncey Gardiner myth, by contrast.
Undoubtedly, many of these people misread Trump’s elevation of Tulsi Gabbard—a transparent shill for Iran and Russia who usually claims to be anti-war—as evidence of him having dovish instincts. In truth, however, her appointment was transactional: repayment for her 2024 endorsement, much like Trump’s installation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services. But as with Gabbard, Kennedy will be discarded if he defies the GOP’s dominant faction.
The bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities represents the logical endpoint of a presidency built on lies and delusions, including the foundational lie about Trump’s supposed opposition to war. Naive supporters of Palestinian freedom have paid the price for months for believing in Trump the dove. We can only hope that his vicious and illegal act against Iran will not lead to even worse consequences than what Netanyahu and Trump have created in Gaza.