How The Trump Administration Sold Out Everything They Claimed To Stand For.

After Calling for No New Wars And Free Speech, The Trump Administration Is Dropping Bombs While Destroying Free Speech Domestically.

Donald Trump and his administration came in claiming to oppose endless wars for the military-industrial complex and support free speech, just to do a 180 and drop bombs in the Middle East for Israel and do a major authoritarian crackdown on free speech.

In this article, I will explain how the Trump administration abandoned almost everything they claimed to believe in.

From Opposing War With Yemen To Dropping Bombs For Bibi.

The fact that Trump is bombing Yemen at the behest of Israel is not exactly surprising; he did veto a bill in his previous term that would have ended American support for Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war on the country.

However, his recent bombing of Yemen did go against things he said when Biden carried out the same policy, as well as members of his administration such as Michael DiMino and Tulsi Gabbard.

For context, Israeli sources told the newspaper Haaretz that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intentionally sabotaged the Gaza cease-fire by refusing to move onto its agreed upon second phase.

The inside source noted that Netenyahu “intends to sabotage the hostage release deal” so it “will not advance Stage 2 of the agreement”. The source noted that this was a cynical move to save his own political career, noting that “Netanyahu knows he doesn't have a government if he proceeds with the deal” due to “Right-wing voters”.

Another Israeli source told the New York Times that the Israeli government was repeatedly violating the ceasefire agreement, admitting “Hamas’s accusations that Israel has not upheld its promises for the first phase of the cease-fire” “were accurate”.

Meanwhile, another Israeli source admitted to the Israeli paper, Maariv, that Hamas “has not violated the (ceasefire) agreement”.

Instead of putting the mild pressure that they reportedly put on Israel to accept the cease-fire deal in the first place, the Trump administration backed Netanyahu’s sabotage of it by approving a 3 billion dollar arms sale to Israel.

Israel used this to commit what Haaretz called “the largest child massacre in Israel’s history,” killing “Two hundred children and 100 women killed in one day” and “400 civilians altogether” in their new genocidal assault in Gaza.

This violation of the ceasefire triggered a response from Ansar Allah or the Houthi movement, a resistance militia in Yemen in solidarity with the Palestinians who put a naval blockade on Israeli ships in the Red Sea in the hopes that it would force them to adhere to the ceasefire agreement.

This flare up could be easily solved diplomatically. All the Trump administration needs to do is pressure Israel to advance to the second phase of the ceasefire they already agreed to in January of this year.

Instead, the Trump administration decided to bomb Yemen on behalf of Israel, launching airstrikes in Yemen and killing 53 people. The Trump administration has recently followed this with a series of 65 airstrikes on Yemen.

The Israeli paper Jerusalem Post noted that Israel’s resumption of the slaughter in Gaza was “coordinated with the US” bombing on Yemen because “The Houthis, with their ballistic missiles, are the last Iranian proxy that could most viably threaten Israel immediately in retaliation for a return to war.”

To recap this depraved policy, the Trump administration is dropping bombs on the poorest country in the Middle East because they were getting in the way of Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy of slaughtering children in Gaza in order to save his political reputation with his country’s far-right.

Aside from the endless layers of moral depravity, this goes directly against the agenda the Trump administration falsely claimed to stand for.

Trump himself criticized this exact same policy when it was carried out under Biden.

On the campaign trail, in an interview with the Tim Pool podcast, Pool said to Trump, “ I Look at the Democrats and many Republicans and its foreign war and foreign expansion,” and Trump replied, “I think it's just a failed mentality. It's crazy. You can solve problems over the telephone. Instead, they start dropping bombs. I see, recently, they're dropping bombs all over Yemen. You don't have to do that”.

Now, all Trump has to do is “pick up the phone” and tell Netanyahu to adhere to the already agreed upon ceasefire, but is instead carrying out the “failed mentality” of “dropping bombs all over Yemen” on Israel’s behalf.

Ironically, Michael P. Dimino, who currently serves as the Pentagon’s “principal policy advisor on all defense and security issues pertaining to the Middle East,” laid this out correctly during the Biden administration.

In January of 2024, Dimino wrote an article for “responsible starcraft” where he argued that “Washington should start by recognizing that both its economic and national security interests are largely unaffected by Red Sea transit”.

He went on to write that

The Houthis have repeatedly linked their motive for attacking ships in the Red Sea to the Israel-Hamas conflict. Over the course of the war, Houthi attacks have correlated with events in Gaza. For example, Houthi attacks decreased during the brief truce in November, only to resume afterward.

and argued that “Working to increase aid shipments to Gaza would not just help to alleviate the humanitarian crisis there, but would deprive the Houthis of their claimed justification for attacks in the Red Sea and provide the group with an offramp for de-escalation that would also serve to prevent indefinite U.S. participation in a broader regional war.”

He noted that this needed to be done through “increased diplomatic pressure on the Israeli government to allow more aid into Gaza,” which he correctly said was “a step the Biden Administration remains uninterested in taking”.

He also wrote that “there are no existential or vital U.S. national interests at stake in Yemen, and very little is at stake for the U.S. economically in the Red Sea”.

However, now that he is the top Middle East advisor for the Pentagon, he is ignoring all the correct points he made under the Biden administration and supporting the exact same policy he called out .

Perhaps the biggest sellout in political history is Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.

In the recent signal chat debacle, Gabbard was seen texting “great work and effects” in reference to the Trump administration’s Yemen bombing.

Gabbard has also publicly championed Trump's Yemen bombing.

What makes this so egregious is that Gabbard had previously made opposition to Washington's war on Yemen one of her top political issues.

In a 2018 interview with the Real News Network, Gabbard called the U.S/Suadi led assault on Yemen an “interventionist war” that “increases destruction, death and suffering”.

She also opposed what she correctly called the United States’ “illegal participation in this Saudi-led genocidal war in Yemen”.

Gabbard also stated that “I and my colleagues are pushing very hard and strongly to draw the line to end the illegal US participation in this war (In Yemen)”.

Gabbard put out a tweet in 2019 saying :

If the main way our President creates a strong economy is to sell weapons to Saudis to bomb innocent people in countries like Yemen, then we need a new president. We need a commander-in-chief who knows the real cost of war & works for peace, not incite more death & destruction

She also tweeted in 2019 that “It is especially grotesque that Trump/Pence/Haley say the US should support killing innocent children/civilians in Yemen”.

She has also put out tweets stating things such as “US intervention in Yemen has not lessened the suffering of the Yemeni people” and “Yemen is not our enemy.”

She even called the war on Yemen a U.S. “proxy war against Iran”.

What makes Gabbard’s support for this war so egregious is that she spent a large part of her career claiming to be strongly opposed to American Wars in the Middle East, especially in Yemen, and now that she is in a real position of power she is cheering on the bombing of a country she once opposed war with.

From Free Speech Champions To 1984.

The Trump administration has consistently made freedom of speech and its preservation a main plank of its campaign promises.

In fact even earlier this month, Trump claimed he “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America”.

The MAGA movement was correct that the Democrats, particularly under the Biden administration, were censorious.

They created a disinformation governance board as a subdivision of the DHS that was intended to police the internet, which was headed by Nina Jankowicz, a so-called “disinformation expert” who has spread every CIA lie, from claiming Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation” to whitewashing U.S. backed Neo-Nazi’s in Ukraine after the 2014 Maidan coup.

The Twitter files leaks showed that the Democratic administration was using the intelligence agencies to push to censor everything from journalists opposed to the Ukraine proxy war to people questioning the official narrative around COVID-19.

Democrats in the House of Representatives, such as Colin Allred, defended this policy when it was revealed by claiming that the intelligence agencies were “trying their best to find a way that our online discourse doesn’t get people hurt or see our democracy undermined”.

They even sent the IRS after journalist Matt Taibbi and threatened to put him in prison for reporting on the Twitter Files leaks and testifying on their content in front of the House Judiciary Committee.

The Biden administration also conducted FBI raids on the former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter because he had written articles for Russian news outlets.

Democrats ranging from Tim Walz to AOC to John Kerry openly came out in opposition to free speech in the name of policing so-called “disinformation”.

The republicans and the Trump administration used these facts to pretend that they were the vanguard against the Democrats’ censorship and protectors of the First Amendment.

But in reality, they were only in favor of free speech for things that they agreed with. Now that they are in power, they are doing even further damage to the First Amendment.

Shortly after Trump claimed he brought “free speech back to America,” his Health and Human Services department, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., put out an order to halt federal funding for universities that did not crack down on pro-Palestine protests.

The move was a blatant violation of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has ruled multiple times, such as in the 1958 Spencer vs. Randall case and the 1996 Legal Services Corporation v. Velazquez case, that withholding government grants over political speech is a violation of the first amendment.

The Trump administration went on to use ICE to arrest Mahmoud Khalil, a legal American resident and green card holder married to an American citizen, because he led protests against the genocide in Gaza at Columbia University.

The Trump administration did not accuse Khalil of any crime and has no proof he has any connection to Hamas or any other group in the Middle East.

As the New York Times noted :

officials have not accused him of having any contact with the terrorist group, taking direction from it or providing material support to it.

The paper noted that the administration’s rationale for arresting him was because “protests that Mr. Khalil played a key part in were antisemitic and created a hostile environment for Jewish students at Columbia” and that “the United States’ foreign policy includes combating antisemitism across the globe and that Mr. Khali’s residency in the nation undermines that policy objective.”

In other words, they are explicitly trying to intimidate and shut down protests opposed to Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza by arresting and threatening to deport legal residents for political speech.

Brian Hauss, a senior lawyer with the ACLU, called the arrest of Khalil “one of the biggest threats, if not the biggest threats to First Amendment freedoms in 50 years”.

This free speech crackdown did not end there; recently, the Trump administration arrested and is planning to deport Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish student at Boston’s Tufts University, because she wrote an op-ed for the school’s newspaper, the Tufts Daily where she called for the school to divest from Israel and “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide”.

The fact that the Trump administration is willing to arrest and deport legal foreign students for something as simple as writing an op-ed in the school’s newspaper shows that they are truly attempting to stamp out any opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza on college campuses.

Aside from the fact that this policy is a blatant violation of the first amendment, it exposes that the Trump administration never actually believed in anything.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has often championed himself as a free speech supporter even saying in 2023 “When people censor speech, when we look back in history, they're never the good guys” and “Government abuses every power that it's given, and if government suddenly has the capacity to censor its critics, it has a license for any atrocity”.

Now, instead of using the Health and Human Services department to take on Big Pharma or the food industry like he was supposed to do, RFK Jr. is using it to give the government the “capacity to censor its critics,” showing that he will happily support giving it “a license for any atrocity” if it means silencing protest against Israel.

Recently, RFK, Jr. tweeted support for this censorship policy, writing, “President Trump has ordered his cabinet to use every constitutional tool to uproot this divisive weed (referring to opposition to Israel)”.

This again showed that he never actually believed in free speech but instead pretended to be a defender of the First Amendment only when it was views he agreed with that were being censored.

Another blatant hypocrite is Vice President JD Vance.

Not long ago, Vance gave a speech to the European Union where he said, “under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree.”

He used this to point out that “In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat”. Vance used this opportunity to contrast the American view of free speech vs. the European view of free speech, bringing up legitimate issues such as the recent judicial coup in Romania and, later, the bogus lawfare campaign against playwright CJ Hopkins in Germany for his opposition to Covid-19 policy.

Vance, now, however, is copying a European lawfare campaign against pro-Palestine speech, which he claimed to be above and opposed to.

In Vance’s speech, he cited examples such as Britain arresting an anti-abortion activist named Adam Smith-Connor but glossed over one of the most dangerous lawfare campaigns against speech in Europe.

Vance did not mention what happened to the journalist Richard Medhurst, who has faced “terrorism” charges in Britain and Austria for his reporting and commentary on Palestine.

Nor did Vance mention that pro-Palestine activists in Britain, such as Asa Winstanley, Sarah Wilkinson, and Richard Barnard, had been targeted by British authorities for posting content online critical of Israel.

Vance also glossed over the fact that Switzerland arrested journalist Ali Abunimah -an American citizen- to prevent him from giving a speech on Palestine or that Germany threatened him with arrest to prevent him from attending a conference in the country on Palestine.

Far from sticking to his stated principle that “we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it”, JD Vance’s administration is now copying this European lawfare campaign against Palestinian speech through their arrest and planned deportation of legal residents like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk for their opposition to Israeli war crimes.

Two Sides Of The Same Coin.

It still shocks me how partisan hacks in American politics don’t actually believe in anything as a principle. The Trump administration correctly opposed the Biden administration’s warmongering at times but is now pushing for more wars in the Middle East on Israel’s behalf.

They pretended to oppose the Democrats’ censorship policy but are now pushing the same thing under the guise of combating “anti-Semitism” and “terrorism” instead of “hate-speech” or “misinformation”.

The Trump administration’s betrayal of any principles they claimed to believe in goes to show that both political parties exist to sell war and censorship, the same shitty product sold in a red and blue package.

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