The only way you can argue that President Donald Trump bucked the hawkish Washington consensus is if you ignore Trump’s entire foreign policy record.

by Branko Marcetic, Jacobin

In only the third episode of his new, Twitter-only show since being bumped off Fox News, Tucker Carlson recently blew the lid off of why the Washington establishment is trying to “put [Donald] Trump behind bars for the rest of his life.” It’s all about foreign policy, Carlson, tells us — specifically “the invasions and occupations and proxy wars” and all other policies “that come with trillion-dollar price tags.”

He points to Trump’s performance in the February 2016 GOP presidential debate, when Trump railed against the Iraq War and the lies that dragged the United States into it, as “the precise moment that [the Washington establishment] decided to send Donald Trump to prison.” The sad fact is that “nobody with Trump’s views is allowed to have power in this country,” where you’re disqualified from high office and, eventually, jailed if you criticize US wars.

Donald Trump speaks at the First in the Nation Leadership Summit in Nashua, NH, on April 18, 2015

“Whatever else you say about him, Donald Trump is the one guy with an actual shot at becoming president who dissents from Washington’s long-standing pointless war agenda,” Carlson concluded. “And for that, that one fact, they’re trying to take Trump out before you can vote for him.”

Carlson’s video is the latest in a genre of recent commentary that argues Trump was, in reality, an antiwar president. At the very least, we’re told, through his supposedly “America First” instincts, Trump unwittingly dealt the harshest blow yet to unrestrained global dominion under Washington.

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