RSSThere’s a rejoinder, namely, “Trump is the biggest warmonger EVERR!!” which cites all the great-power confrontation of his term. But that falls apart when you compare Trump’s putative saber-rattling with CIA’s response to the Eisenhower-Herter peace initiative: the two provocation campaigns are the same. CIA basically did everything they could think of to piss off Stalin (including the sugar in Francis Gary Powers’ gas tank.) To demonstrate good faith, Eisenhower would have had to purge CIA, and even then heads of state were too bashful to try that.
So Trump’s putative militarism looks more like helplessness, as CIA antagonizes the world to get us all daggers drawn and hype the threats. It would be an interesting experiment if Trump campaigned on old-time GOP isolationism (which we would now call peace, as it culminated in the Kellogg-Briand agreement.) Trump would win overwhelmingly with it. But after the election CIA would probably just end-run him or whack him like JFK.