Despite the fact that some of the most aggressive military expansions and escalations have occurred under Democratic presidents — from Franklin Delano Roosevelt during World War II to Lyndon B. Johnson in Vietnam and Barack Obama in Afghanistan — Republicans have repeatedly insisted that they have the market cornered on patriotism and love of military. But economist and veteran New York Times journalist Paul Krugman, in a blistering column this week, stresses that “Republican superpatriotism” has always been a “fraud” — and that is more obvious than ever in the Trump era.
“Republicans have spent the past half-century portraying themselves as more patriotic, more committed to national security than Democrats,” Krugman explains. “Richard Nixon’s victory in 1972, Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 and George W. Bush’s victory in 2004 — the only presidential election out of the past seven in which the Republican won the popular vote — all depended in part on posing as the candidate more prepared to confront menacing foreigners.”
But under President Donald Trump, Krugman stresses, many Republicans are more than happy to look the other way while Trump engages in “foreign entanglements” that clearly aren’t in the United States’ best interests — for example, reports that Trump tried to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
View the complete September 24 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.