Trump’s Biggest Lie?

ERIC ZUESSE 

INTRODUCTION

(NOTE: Remarks from US President Donald Trump that will be considered as representing possibly his biggest lie will here be boldfaced, so that they will stand out from the context in which he stated them.)

Trump escalated Bush’s and Obama’s invasions and military occupations of the sovereign nations of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. But on January 7th, he promised, in one of his thousands of lying tweets, that, “Endless Wars, especially those which are fought out of judgement mistakes that were made many years ago, & those where we are getting little financial or military help from the rich countries that so greatly benefit from what we are doing, will eventually come to a glorious end!”

Then, on Sunday, January 13th, he tweeted that if Turkey won’t do in Syria what he, the US President, wants it to do there, then the United States will be in the first official stage of war against Turkey, the economic-sanctions phase, which nowadays is the prelude to an invasion, as has been the case since 1990 regarding Iraq. On January 13th, he tweeted, “Will devastate Turkey economically if they hit Kurds. Create 20 mile safe zone….” Minutes later, he tweeted: “...Likewise, do not want the Kurds to provoke Turkey. Russia, Iran and Syria have been the biggest beneficiaries of the long term US policy of destroying ISIS in Syria - natural enemies. We also benefit but it is now time to bring our troops back home. Stop the ENDLESS WARS!”

First, here, will be discussed his January 7th string of lies, in order to isolate which one of those was the biggest:

He might be truthful about his intent, to reverse his own (previously escalatory) policies against those named nations (Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria — his Administration’s efforts to overthrow or to keep in power the given nation’s leader and government). However, he ignores his own having contributed to those “judgement mistakes that were made” (such as his having increased American troop-levels in those countries — his having escalated, instead of eliminated, those military occupations). 

And, then, on January 12th, The Hill bannered, “US calls for ‘new government’ in Venezuela”. So, Trump obviously still believes that a US President has the right to overthrow or install a government in any country he wishes — the right to perpetrate coups and military invasions anywhere in the world. This is a craving for global empire. 

He still continues to believe, like his predecessors did, that the US President is the policeman, judge, jury, and executioner, of any government, anywhere in the world, just like the international tyrants George W. Bush and Barack Obama did. Their imperialistic lies were accompanied in some cases by coups but in other cases by outright invasions and military occupations, and destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq and Honduras and Libya and Syria and Ukraine. They destroyed those countries, none of which had ever perpetrated aggression against the United States. This was therefore pure aggression. (Trump as President never condemns them, for the lie-based international aggressions that they had perpetrated.) 

Trump’s words have always been untrustworthy, some of them promises to the left, but mostly promises to the right. But only his actions have really mattered, and they’ve been consistently to the far right, including neo-conservatism. That means imposition of the American empire. He has been trying to do that — impose the American empire. He does it not only by expanding America’s existing bloated ‘defense’ budget (half of the world’s total), but by expanding the numbers of US military bases and troops in invaded and occupied countries such as Syria. None of those countries had ever invaded nor threatened to invade the United States (although Al Qaeda in Afghanistan did in 2001, with lots of American Government and Saudi help — but then the US President, Bush, invaded and occupied Afghanistan, instead of took out Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri — and he and his 911 Commission hid the guilt of George W. Bush and his buddy “Bandar Bush”; so, this was like “The Emperor can do no wrong,” and Trump is following in their imperial footsteps). 

Invasions and coups, like those, are (and were, before Trump became President) pure aggressions. Despite Trump’s lies, America is the global aggressor, in fact (even recognized globally as being such). Trump does nothing to stop and reverse that horrendous bipartisan (Democratic and Republican) American aggressive reality. Trump’s actions have instead been like that of his recent predecessors: neo-conservative, neo-imperialist, aggressive, foreign policies. They’ve made mockeries of his repeated promises not to do that sort of thing. He has even stocked his Administration with loads of G.W. Bush infamous neocons like John Bolton, some of whom he had condemned when he was running for President. 

This is why everyone distrusts Trump now, except his base-voters, who ignore his incessant record of having lied — they trust everything he says, even his self-contradictions. To be intelligent now and yet continue to trust Donald Trump, is extremely difficult, if not logically impossible, to do, especially after his enormous record of self-contradictions.

TRUMP’S BIGGEST LIE

But his biggest big lie has certainly been the one that he stated in his January 7th tweet, about whom the beneficiaries of those military invasions and occupations are. Those beneficiaries are not as he said, “rich countries that so greatly benefit from what we are doing.” To the exact contrary.

Consider what the actual impacts of America’s neo-conservative, neo-imperialist, Government, have been, upon those “rich countries” (by which Trump is referring to the EU):

The January 14th issue of the liberal New Yorker magazine states at least this matter accurately, when Elisabeth Zerofsky’s article, which is titled in the print edition as “The Illiberal State: Viktor Orban’s vision for Europe”, asserts that: “Until 2015, Hungary received around three thousand asylum requests per year. That year, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, travelled from Turkey through Bulgaria to Serbia and Croatia, where they attempted to cross the Hungarian border into the E.U. Many wanted to reach Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel, declaring, ‘We can do this,’ was welcoming a million refugees. Hungary, a smaller and poorer state than Germany, was ill equipped to deal with the chaotic crowds in the border area headed toward trains and buses that would take them onward.”

In other words: US President Trump, who is famous for exaggerating the harms that huge numbers of undocumented immigrants cause, must certainly be at least conscious of the fact that those floods of millions of Muslim refugees into what he calls here “the rich countries that so greatly benefit from what we are doing,” are “mostly from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan,” and that those refugees have been fleeing countries that the US Government had invaded, and that the US Government still does occupy, by thousands of American troops and constant supplies of weapons. America’s invasions created this crisis for EU nations. Trump demands that those European countries be grateful for those millions of refugees, from countries that he bans or discourages from sending any refugees into the United States. Hypocrisy worse than that, can’t be imagined.

He thinks that those European countries ought to be grateful for America’s having caused in Europe this refugee crisis, which is tearing the EU apart.

If that’s not his biggest lie, then what is?

But maybe his biggest lie isn’t that “the rich countries … so greatly benefit from what we are doing”; maybe, instead, it’s that all of those “judgment mistakes” were “judgement mistakes that were made many years ago,” and that he didn’t make any of them, but only his predecessors did.

However, maybe his biggest lie is instead his hiding whom the actual beneficiaries of his, and the rest of the American Government’s, permanent-warfare state have actually been, and always are.

Consider, for example, this passage from the 200-page, 5 November 2018, study by the Project on Government Oversight, “Defense Contractors’ Capture of Pentagon Officials”:

BRASS PARACHUTES: Defense Contractors’ Capture of Pentagon Officials Through the Revolving Door 

The revolving door is just one of several forms of undue influence on the operations of the Department of Defense. While beyond the scope of this report, the reverse-revolving door (when defense industry officials join the government, raising concerns they will then give preferential treatment to their former employers) is also a matter of significant concern. Top contractors have been over-represented in Department leadership. At the beginning of his Administration, President Obama issued an ethics executive order banning lobbyists form [from] working in agencies they lobbied during the previous two years, only to issue the first waiver shortly thereafter to his first Deputy Secretary of Defense, William Lynn, who was previously a Raytheon lobbyist.25 The last Deputy Secretary for that Administration, Bob Work, joined Raytheon’s board shortly after he retired from the government.26 President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, was a former board member of General Dynamics. His Deputy Secretary, Patrick Shanahan, came from Boeing, the Pentagon’s second largest contractor. Campaign contributions, lobbyists, earmarks, industry-sponsored trips, and contracts structured to garner political support for specific contractors’ programs, also undermine the fairness and effectiveness of the procurement system. The government and the public have significantly more — though still inadequate — information about those other forms of influence-peddling. For example, campaign contributions must be periodically disclosed, registered lobbyists must report their expenditures and generic lobbying activities, and incoming executive branch officials have to disclose their positions held outside of government. But the public has significantly less information when it comes to the activities of former government officials. President Trump has spoken out against that conflict of interest. “I think anybody that gives out these big contracts should never ever, during their lifetime, be allowed to work for a defense company, for a company that makes that product,” then-President-elect Trump said.  

Just two months before this POGO study, there was a Code Pink study, “War Profiteers: The US War Machine”, about the major role that foreign buyers of US weapons, such as the Saud family, play in this American corruption. (America’s efforts ever since the late 1940s, to overthrow Syria’s determinedly secular non-sectarian Government, and to replace it with one that would be controlled by the rabidly fundamentalist-Sunni Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia, are excellent examples of that corrupt “US War Machine” in action. See this and this and this and this and this, for documentation of this.)

It’s people like them, and the billionaires who control the major US ‘defense’ contractors such as Lockheed Martin, and who control America’s international extraction corporations such as ExxonMobil, who benefit from America’s rabid militarism. It’s not “the rich countries” of the EU. And Trump’s denial, of this barbaric historical fact, is actually his biggest of all of his big lies. 

Without being honest to the public, no government can be a democracy; it can only be a corrupt dictatorship. And that’s what America now actually is.

Trump certainly isn’t the truth-teller who stands against, and tries to rectify, that ugly reality. An excellent current example of the insidious nature of this constantly attempted international dictatorship that Trump refuses to expose, was provided on January 8th, by Mark Ames and Max Blumenthal, at the GrayZone Project, and headlined “New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics”. Their reporting about this would probably win a Pulitzer, if America were a democracy and if the Pulitzers were honest.

Then, regarding Trump’s tweet on January 13th, “Will devastate Turkey economically if they hit Kurds. Create 20 mile safe zone...,” he’s clearly threatening economic sanctions against Turkey. He says that he wants to end “endless wars” and, now, in order to attain that, he uses against Turkey the threat of beginning a new war, this one against them. His followup that same day, “Russia, Iran and Syria have been the biggest beneficiaries of the long term US policy of destroying ISIS in Syria” is a compound lie, because the US had avoided targeting ISIS in Syria until Russia started bombing ISIS in Syria on 30 September 2015, and the US had even been secretly arming ISIS there so as to help ISIS and Al Qaeda to overthrow Syria’s secular and non-sectarian Government. Thus, whereas Russia started bombing ISIS in Syria on 30 September 2015, America (having become embarrassed) started bombing ISIS in Syria on 16 November 2015. Trump wants to steal from Assad, and from Putin, and from Rouhani, the credit for the success that they have thus far achieved at defeating ISIS in Syria. America — ISIS’s (otherwise called “ISIL’s”) secret supplier — thus tries to present itself as ISIL’s conqueror. (Table 26 of the July 2015 Orb International poll of Syrians asked Syrians for “the reason that explains the presence of ISIL [in their country]?” And 82% of Syrians said “ISIL is US foreign manufacture.” So, they’re aware of that fact.) 

So, which is Trump’s biggest lie? Make your own choice, and it’ll be reasonable, because they’re all huge.

CLOSING NOTE

On January 14th, the generally reliable analyst Alex Christoforou headlined at The Duran, “Mike Pompeo tours Middle East to challenge John Bolton as US foreign policy TSAR”, and concluded that “it appears President Trump’s promised US troop ‘full’ and ‘immediate’ withdrawal from Syria appears to finally be in motion.” If that turns out actually and finally to be the case, then the US under Trump is finally withdrawing from Syria, like the US under Nixon withdrew from Vietnam on 29 March 1973. Interestingly, in both cases, that would be a Republican President finally ending a US invasion that had been started by a Democratic President, and the Republican President lying constantly and never condemning the Democratic President for having invaded that country. Unless American Presidents publicly acknowledge that the US Government has been controlled by a deeply evil militaristic and military Deep State that has served only America’s billionaires, and that all of these had been US invasions of countries that never had invaded the US and that actually never even threatened to do so, the US will continue to be that type of country — a global invader, which aspires to control the entire world. In that case, the US would turn out to be the successor to Nazi Germany, but a nuclear superpower.