No, We Do Not Have to 'Go To War With the President We Have'

An answer to Bill Kristol

Well this is going well: “Trump drops f-bomb live on TV over Israel and Iran violating ceasefire”

Happy Tuesday.

The president we have

As we wait to find out whether the ceasefire holds or descends into farce, we need to sort out some confusion among the normally clear-eyed ranks of the movement formerly known as “Never Trump”. Writing in the Financial Times, Ed Luce highlighted the problem:

Trump’s Iran strikes are being cheered on by many of the “Never Trumpers” who had been warning so starkly of Trump’s autocratic impulses. They are prepared to risk the power-aggrandising opportunity that war will offer Trump.

Indeed, we seem to have a case of selective amnesia among some of the most vocal Trump critics — who usually have no illusions about this absolutely not-normal president and the existential threat that he poses. But, for some of the most stalwart Never Trumpers, apparently, it is always 2003.

“You’ve got to go to war with the president you have,” my former colleague Bill Kristol told The New York Times on Wednesday. (His comment is a play on Donald Rumsfeld’s Iraq War-era comment: “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”)

But the president we have is Donald J. Trump.

And amid all of the known unknown and unknown unknown this much is known: Trump is uniquely unfit to be a war president — and the dangers are palpable. And yet, Kristol is willing to give him the green light to lead us to war.

“I’ve never been, and don’t intend ever to be, a supporter of Donald Trump,” he said “But I wish the president and his administration well in this crisis.”

In a longer Bulwark piece, Kristol — an OG Never Trumper — argues that despite the fact that Trump is Trump — unlikely to be “a font of prudence, a source of statesmanship” —“we also must recognize that we are at a very unusual moment, when getting things broadly right will be important for the future of the region and the world.”

Israel went to war with the flawed government it has.

It may be, as Immanuel Kant wrote, that “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” But out of the crooked timber of the Trump administration we have to hope that, in this case, a good outcome can be made.

This is — and I’m trying to put this diplomatically — myopic.

As I have noted, the world would indeed be a better and safer place if Iran did not have a nuclear weapon. But the new Trump rationalizers are remarkably cheap dates. Trump has offered no intelligence to back the claim that Iran was on the verge of developing nukes; and, in the process, he brushed aside the Constitution and thoroughly ghosted Congress. There were no consultations. No hearings. No debate. No vote. Nothing.

But even that does not capture the unique danger of the moment.

For years, Americans have suffered from a failure of imagination — not realizing how fragile our constitutional republic really was. But it doesn’t take much imagination to recognize the threat that Trump poses if he becomes a Wartime President.

Civil liberties are never more vulnerable than during wartime. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus; Woodrow Wilson enacted draconian laws restricting free speech and the press; FDR forced Japanese-Americans into camps; the second Bush conducted warrantless surveillance.¹

What might Trump do?

Let’s go back to Kristol’s argument that “you go to war with the president you have”. But this is not 2003.

It’s 2025, and we have to confront the crisis that we have.

• The “president we have” is a chronic liar, erratic narcissist, seditionist, and convicted felon (which seems relevant in this context).

• The “president we have” is in the process of attacking the pillars of our Constitutional order; ignoring laws; defying courts; deploying active duty troops on the streets of American cities; radicalizing the military; weaponizing the Justice Department into a weapon of personal retribution.

• The “president we have” has already invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify renditioning migrants to Third World gulags; and is within inches of invoking the Insurrection Act.

• The “president we have” is betraying Ukraine; insulting our allies; undermining NATO; threatening to invade Panama and Greenland.

• The “president we have” has suggested taking over Gaza, ethnically cleansing it, and developing it as a gaudy TrumpWorld.

• The “president we have” has justified and defended war crimes.

• The president “we have” is entangled in corrupt deals throughout the Mideast; and remains Vladimir Putin’s slavering bitch.

• The “president we have” is surrounded by chodes, clowns, amateurs, and cranks.

So, NO. We do not have to go to war with this man.

This is what makes Kristol’s Trump/Iran rationale so disappointing. The hyper-realists among the neocons should not ignore the very real dangers of a Trump-led war. In the Atlantic, Robert Kagan sounds the warning. "The United States is well down the road to dictatorship,” he writes. “Imagine what Trump would do with a state of war.”

That is the context in which a war with Iran will occur. Donald Trump has assumed dictatorial control over the nation’s law enforcement. The Justice Department, the police, ICE agents, and the National Guard apparently answer to him, not to the people or the Constitution. He has neutered Congress by effectively taking control of the power of the purse….

Think of how Trump can use a state of war to strengthen his dictatorial control at home. Trump declared a state of national emergency in response to a nonexistent “invasion” by Venezuelan gangs.

Imagine what he will do when the United States is actually at war with a real country, one that many Americans fear. Will he tolerate dissent in wartime? Woodrow Wilson locked up peace activists, including Eugene V. Debs. You think Trump won’t? He has been locking people up on flimsier excuses in peacetime. Even presidents not bent on dictatorship have taken measures in wartime that would otherwise be unthinkable.

Exit take: If Never Trump means anything, it means Never Trump Wars.

²

Paul Rieckhoff: The dangerous new normal

On today’s “To the Contrary” podcast I’m joined by Iraq War veteran and Independent Americans host Paul Rieckhoff for a sobering conversation on the U.S. bombing campaign against Iran and the implications of Donald Trump’s unilateral decision to launch it. We unpack the erosion of guardrails around war powers, the growing risks of domestic instability, and the unnerving absence of public debate.

Subscribers can listen to an ad-free version right here… or you can watch on YouTube / Listen (and subscribe) on Apple/ Spotify / iHeart / RSS Feed.

One highlight: a reminder to remember the humanity

Tuesday dogs

It’s that time of year.

1. Via Cato:

The [Bush] administration had originally carried out this surveillance on a radical theory of “inherent presidential authority” spelled out by then–Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, which held that during wartime, the president’s surveillance powers could not be constrained by Congress, or even the Fourth Amendment. After he returned to academia in 2003, however, his successors grew uncomfortable with his leaps of legal logic and stopped relying on his questionable opinions on a broad range of counterterrorism issues. To justify Bush’s surveillance programs, DOJ lawyers switched to the theory, spelled out at length in a January 2006 white paper, that Congress’s Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) against Al Qaeda and their affiliates had created a tacit exception to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Though FISA is supposed to be the “exclusive means” by which intelligence surveillance is conducted, DOJ attorneys argued that the AUMF authority to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against those who the president “determines planned, authorized, committed or aided” the September 11 attacks necessarily included the power to conduct surveillance, superseding FISA’s judicial review requirements.

2. To be fair, Kristol acknowledges many of the downsides to Trump’s war in this podcast, and cites Robert Kagan’s Atlantic piece as well, but ultimately says he’s less worries about the domestic fallout than Kagan.

Trump might use that as an excuse or in any case, just the momentum of it might make it easier for him to do all kinds of authoritarian things. including politicizing the military and all that. So that's the, let's say, the domestic consequences of this in terms of Trump's authoritarianism. Bob was very focused on that.

And I think it's a fair thing to worry about. I'm not... I don't think it's that big, you know, again, if it is a couple, even if it's one or even if it's three or four military strikes against Iran, I don't really think it changes the dynamics much here at home.

So I'm less worried about that, but it's a fair point.