One of the stories that got lost in the shuffle while everyone was waving their arms shrieking that Kim Jong Un is about to nuke Guam was the fact that the Trump administration is on track to have dropped more bombs during the first year of his administration than Obama did in his last. Foreign Policy reports that as of July 31, the Trump administration had dropped 20,650 bombs, which is already 80 percent of Obama’s sum total in 2016.

Foreign Policy rightly notes that this trend runs in stark contrast to some of Trump’s campaign rhetoric in which he criticized Hillary Clinton for her consistent pattern of opting for military aggression over peace. Many of the people who voted for Trump — and many outsiders like myself who did not — had desperately hoped that the 45th President of the United States would at the very least pull back on America’s relentless warmongering to some extent and adopt a more non-interventionist military posture.

This has not happened. Just as Obama came in on a platform of hope and change only to end up continuing and expanding all of Bush’s most evil policies, Trump came in promising to make America great “again” and start putting America first. In his inauguration speech the new president President talked about defending America’s own borders instead of the borders of other nations and not wanting to impose its way of life on anyone but to rather “shine as an example” instead. His speeches early in his administration saw him panned as an “isolationist” by proponents of interventionism.

So when those of us who heard him saying things like this upon being sworn into office,

“We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world, but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first. We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example. We will shine for everyone to follow.”

and this,

“We’ve defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own. And spent trillions and trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay. We’ve made other countries rich, while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon.”

and this,

“We will build new roads and highways and bridges and airports and tunnels and railways all across our wonderful nation. We will get our people off of welfare and back to work, rebuilding our country with American hands and American labor.”

we found ourselves indulging in a little bit of hope. Maybe America would pull back from its self-appointed role as world policeman. The notion of putting Americans first delighted those of us who wished the US would indeed start taking care of its own and leave the rest of us the fuck alone. While establishment pundits in America reacted with horror to talk of nationalism, protectionism and non-interventionism, those who are sick of US interventionism were saying “Yeah, that’d be great thanks.”

Instead, we find ourselves looking at George W. Bush’s fifth term.

The United States has been evolving into an imperialist globe-spanning corporate tentacle beast that feeds on the blood of civilians for longer than any living person can remember, but things really kicked into high gear when the neocons took over the executive branch of the US government during the Bush administration. The neoconservative ideology of American supremacy, which posits that the fall of the Soviet Union meant the United States has been selected by history as the body intended to lead the world by any means necessary, saw two full-scale invasions and occupations in just eighteen months following the September 11 attacks, with more scheduled had things gone as planned.

With Obama this continued, as did the expansion of the Orwellian surveillance programs instituted by the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11. In addition to Iraq and Afghanistan, bombing campaigns were conducted in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Syria. Libya was transformed into a failed state by US interventionism, and The CIA and Pentagon’s arming and funding of terrorist factions in Syria helped facilitate the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

Trump drew international applause for ending the failed CIA program of arming anti-Assad terrorists in Syria, but this means little since the Pentagon program doing effectively the same thing is still up and running, and the US is still amassing troops in the nation. There’s a proposal to start arming Ukraine against Russia on the table which even Obama refused to do, and Trump has said he’d support his Justice Department in prosecuting WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange. The Orwellian surveillance state continues unabated, and the bombs keep falling.

It doesn’t matter who you vote for, America. It doesn’t matter if you support the donkey party or the elephant party, it doesn’t matter what your personal ideology is or how you think your government ought to behave; a specific agenda will be marched forward regardless of what you want and what you believe. Your country is ruled by an elite class for whom your personal opinions about how America should behave and what sort of leaders it should have are nothing but a mild inconvenience, easily circumvented by mass media propaganda and legalized bribery in the form of corporate lobbying and campaign donations.

The data is in, and it turns out that virtually everyone is wrong about Trump. He is not a Nazi, nor is he a populist savior. He’s not even unusual — he’s just one more garden variety deep state tool advancing the agenda of the corporate machine. Parts of the deep state only want Trump out because he’s weird and unpredictable and thus a poor steward of their plutocratic investments, not because he’s some kind of revolutionary hero.

It’s time to stop finicking over who is sitting in the fake leadership positions of Official Washington and start focusing on your real leaders, America. We need to start pouring our collective creativity into finding out ways to beat these bastards and crush their ability to manipulate and control the world. I’ve been beating the drum of killing their propaganda machine, and I think that’s a great place to start. Further suggestions are welcome.

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