Trump's claim he's the only US President in 72 Years not to start a war is false: from the day one he started a full-scale war against America ... "
FDR
Liliputins. What, the heck, is this?
http://stihi.ru/2021/11/24/7101
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Fact Check: Trump Claims He's the Only US President in 72 Years Not To Have a War. Here's What the History Books Say
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Donald Trump. Getty Images
Donald Trump. Getty Images
© Provided by Snopes
Claim:
Trump is the only U.S. president in the last 72 years (since 1952) not to "have any wars."
Rating:
False (About this rating?)
Context:
While the United States was not involved in any wars during Trump's presidency, he was not the only president in the last 72 years of whom that was true.
"I had no wars. I'm the only president in 72 years ... I didn't have any wars," former U.S. President Donald Trump told Iowa voters on Jan. 10, 2024, at a town hall hosted by Fox News.
The clip went viral on social media and was reposted by supporters of Trump's 2024 presidential campaign.
But the truth of the matter is a lot harder to discern than Trump's quick and concise soundbite suggests. Trump said he was the only president in 72 years to not have a war. That places our starting date in 1952, dating back to the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Unfortunately for Trump's case, defining the word "war" is rather tricky and the answer might depend on what definition you use.
Under Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, only Congress is given the power to declare war:
[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water; . . .
According to the official website of the U.S. Senate, this is a power Congress has used 11 times, starting against Great Britain in the War of 1812. The last time that power was exercised by Congress was in the midst of World War II, on June 4, 1942, when it declared war against the small Axis countries of Bulgaria, Hungary and Rumania (now Romania). The U.S. was already at war with Japan, Nazi Germany and Italy at that point.
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Under this definition — to be a U.S. war, Congress must declare it so — Trump is not the only president in the last 72 years without a war. No presidents in the last 72 years have presided over an official war declared by Congress. This definition is obviously too restrictive. As the Senate website notes, "Since [World War II, Congress] has agreed to resolutions authorizing the use of military force and continues to shape U.S. military policy through appropriations and oversight."
Counting the various conflicts commonly referred to as "wars" by historians, we must include the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as full-scale wars. The Korean War was started under Harry S. Truman, the Vietnam War under Lyndon B. Johnson, the Gulf War under George H. W. Bush, and the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan under George W. Bush.
By this metric, Trump joins nine other presidents since 1952 — Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden — as having "had no wars."
This might still feel slightly disingenuous, however, because several of those presidents helped to escalate those conflicts and therefore the U.S. should be considered to have been involved in them. This means we must also count Eisenhower, the president at the end of the Korean War and the first to place troops in Vietnam, both Kennedy and Nixon's actions in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and Obama's expansion of U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This leaves a shorter list of Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Trump and Biden as presidents who have not been involved in wars. Unfortunately, we're still not done, because Reagan and Clinton sent U.S. troops to other conflicts. As examples, Reagan ordered the full invasion of the island of Grenada in 1983 and Clinton sent troops to Yugoslavia during the Bosnian War.
This leaves us with Ford, Carter, Trump and Biden as not having been involved in wars.
A true pacifist could point to the Congressional Research Service's list of all uses of U.S. troops abroad, and by that metric, all of these presidents have ordered military actions. Ford used military forces during the 1975 evacuation of Vietnam and 1976 evacuation of Lebanon, Carter used forces in a rescue attempt during the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis, Trump continued deployments and bombings in Syria (and ordered the drone strike that killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani), and on Jan. 11, 2024, Biden ordered air strikes against Houthi groups in Yemen.
So yes, Trump has quite a solid record with not being at war. A large part of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq took place under Trump. However, because Carter and Ford (and Biden, depending on how U.S. involvement in Ukraine, Israel and Yemen develops), are also not considered to have been involved in wars during their presidencies, we rate Trump's statement as "False."
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How 'legal terrorist' Trump has waged a 50-year battle against the US justice system
Story by Alex Henderson •
01/13/24
Donald Trump with President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan in 1983
Donald Trump with President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan in 1983
© provided by AlterNet
Unless former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley somehow manages to pull off a major upset, the 2024 presidential race will likely be a rematch between GOP frontrunner Donald Trump and Democratic incumbent President Joe Biden. This comes at a time when Trump is up against four criminal indictments and a variety of civil lawsuits — an unprecedented situation for the presumptive presidential nominee of a major political party in the United States.
Trump has been angrily railing against the judges and prosecutors in the criminal and civil cases he is facing, and his critics on both the left and the right have been warning that he is waging a full-fledged assault on the rule of law.
But in an article published on January 12, Politico's Michael Kruse emphasizes that Trump's battle with the American legal system didn't begin when he became a politician — it has been going for over half a century.
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"Trump and his allies say he is the victim of the weaponization of the justice system, but the reality is exactly the opposite," Kruse explains. "For literally more than 50 years, according to thousands of pages of court records and hundreds of interviews with lawyers and legal experts, people who have worked for Trump, against Trump or both, and many of the myriad litigants who've been caught in the crossfire, Trump has taught himself how to use and abuse the legal system for his own advantage and aims."
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Kruse continues, "Many might view the legal system as a place to try to avoid, or as perhaps a necessary evil, or maybe even as a noble arbiter of equality and fairness. Not Trump. He spent most of his adult life molding it into an arena in which he could stake claims and hunt leverage. It has not been for him a place of last resort so much as a place of constant quarrel."
As a young real estate mogul back in 1973, the Politico reporter notes, Trump was carefully studying the methods used by the "notorious" lawyer Roy Cohn. Trump, according to Kruse, "exploited as loopholes the legal system's bedrock tenets" when, in 1973, the federal government sued him for "racist rental practices."
Conservative legal expert J. Michael Luttig, a retired judge, told Politico, "He has attacked the judicial system, our system of justice and the rule of law his entire life. And this, to him, is the grand finale."
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Similarly, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-California) told Politico, "There's probably no single person in America who is more, I would say, knowledgeable and experienced in our legal system — as both a plaintiff and as a defendant — than Donald Trump…. Trump is a legal terrorist."
Another prominent Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California), warns that 2024 could determine whether the rule of law survives of collapses in the U.S.
Schiff told Politico, "We're about to go through a great trial in this country.… We're going to be testing the proposition that the rule of law applies to everyone and no one's above the law. It will be particularly wrenching because Trump will continue to make the false claim that he's being politically persecuted, and it will also give Trump the continuing opportunity to tear down the system."
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Read Michael Kruse's full report for Politico at this link.
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