Many years after he left the presidency, Lyndon Johnson lamented how Vietnam consumed his entire term.
“That bitch of a war killed the lady I really loved – the Great Society,” he reportedly said.
It did not matter that he had helped the country grieve the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and signed landmark civil rights and voting rights laws. People forgot that he created Medicare and Medicaid.
His decision to escalate the war meant that chants of “Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today” echoed for generations. Martin Luther King Jr. broke with Johnson despite his civil rights accomplishments.
President Donald Trump may not realize it now, but he did the same thing with his presidency. The “One Big, Beautiful Bill”? It’s now an afterthought.
This had come after more than a week of teasing what his decision would be. As late as Friday, Trump said he would make his decision within two weeks.
Forget about his relationship with Elon Musk turning sour and DOGE. Forget Trump’s revenge tour against his perceived enemies like law firms. Forget his war on DEI and transgender people. Forget any judicial nominations he might make.
If the January 6 riot will be the defining moment of Trump’s first term in the White House, the second sentence of his obituary will be his decision to fully side with Israel on Iran to the extent of using massive U.S. military might without any apparent direct provocation.
Trump also shares a parallel with another president. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson ran for re-election on the slogan of, “He kept us out of war,” to highlight how he had kept the country out of World War I, only to have the United States enter the war the year afterward.
Trump preached that he would be the candidate who would not send the nation into war. Last year, Trump spent one of his final campaign stops in Warren, Mich., making an appeal to Muslim Americans who loathed Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s support for Israel amid its assault on Gaza.
“If Kamala wins, only death and destruction await because she is the candidate of endless wars,” he said. “I am the candidate of peace. I am peace. But I need every Muslim American in Michigan to get the hell out and vote.”
Muslim and Arab-American voters rewarded him handsomely by swinging to the right. Now, Trump has fully thrown his support behind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long promoted the idea that Iran was just weeks away from obtaining a nuclear weapon, in a way that Biden and Harris never did.
In fact, Trump knows how wars can be a drag just by looking at what happened in Biden’s presidency beyond his support for Israel.
After a honeymoon period, Biden’s approval ratings tumbled precipitously after his exit from Afghanistan. Trump made hay out of this and even invited the families of US servicemembers who died during the exit to speak at the Republican National Convention last year in Milwaukee.
.jpeg?width=1200&auto=webp&trim=335%2C0%2C1009%2C0&w=390&resize=390,220&ssl=1 "‘One day, the camera will fall from my hands’: How Maryam Abu Daqqa fearlessly documented the war in Gaza")
