President Trump used the anti-war rhetoric of the left against Liz Cheney this week, and it so upset leftists that they resorted to their usual strategy of completely misrepresenting what he said, rather than honestly responding to the charge.

Let’s begin with the statement itself, and its context.

President Trump was using Liz Cheney as a poster child for what he considers the war hawks of the Washington uniparty, the people who are always happy to start unnecessary wars so they can feel good about nation-building, or make money for their big munitions-manufacturing donors, or even play God by remaking the world as they imagine it ought to be.  

It’s a trope as old as the anti-war movement — the concept of politicians, sitting fat and safe in Washington, thousands of miles from the action where they send other people’s children to fight.

In this context, President Trump said of Liz Cheney, “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay?  Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

He continued, “You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building, saying, ‘Oh, gee, we’ll, let’s send — let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’”

You don’t have to be on that side of the issue to recognize this argument.  President Trump is hardly the first person to allege that these hawkish politicians might not be so happy to advocate for war if they were the ones holding a rifle at the front, facing off against the enemy in a possibly unnecessary war.

President Trump’s detractors immediately mischaracterized his statement, claiming that President Trump had just called for Liz Cheney to face a firing squad.

Excuse me?  He clearly said, “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there.”  Who ever stood someone up to face a firing squad and gave the target a rifle with which to shoot back?

The idea that he was referring to a firing squad is laughable.  Of course the imagery was of a battlefield.

The idea that this was misunderstood is ridiculous on its face.  Every listener knew exactly what President Trump meant, and what familiar argument he was using.  The left just wanted to claim that the president had said something outrageous, and since he hadn’t, they made it up.

It is worth spending a moment contemplating.

The conservative instinct is to look at this incident, recognize that there’s nothing there, and move on.

But the incident does more than simply remind us of how the modern left practices deception.  It also reminds us of how far the left has fallen in recent years, since leftists were the ones making this argument against those politicians they labeled “chickenhawks” during Vietnam and the Cold War.  Now that they’re the ones “benefiting” from the power high of arms sales and fomenting endless war, they have forgotten their own recent philosophy.

The incident also shows President Trump’s independent thinking.  Whether one is fully on his side in this issue or not (personally, Gentle Reader, I’m sometimes a bit closer to the hawkish side myself), one must respect the president’s nonpartisan handling of the issue, choosing to make Liz Cheney, a former Republican who went over to the dark side, the poster child for the war machine caucus in Washington.  It is an appealing argument to thoughtful, peaceful members of all wings of the American electorate — left, right, and center.

Finally, and perhaps this might be the most important aspect of the incident, it showcases once again how out of touch the Washington elites are, from the perspective of the American public.

This image really wasn’t just a statement that Washington politicians concentrate more on donations from arms contractors than on soldiers, their parents, and their families.  It’s about more than that.  This image is a stand-in for everything else that the regulatory state does in Washington without regard for real people in flyover country.

Bureaucrats ban incandescent light bulbs because they don’t care that the new plastic Chinese models cost ten times as much; the bureaucrats don’t buy their own light bulbs, as private citizens do — or if they do, they get taxpayer-funded subsidies for them.

Bureaucrats ban natural gas cooktops and natural gas water heaters, and they require double the size and power of natural gas furnaces, because living on a federal paycheck, they don’t care how much their war on appliance increases costs to homeowners, restaurateurs and renters.  People on private-sector paychecks or fixed incomes can’t afford to pay double for a furnace, and the bureaucrat is oblivious to their suffering.

The politicians who dream up crippling taxes and regulatory structures that discourage entrepreneurship and local manufacturing don’t care because they don’t know any entrepreneurs or factory owners; they know the C-suite management of huge publicly traded companies who can always get their companies excepted from such regulations, or import their products from China, where none of these rules applies.  These out-of-touch politicians may not even realize that their lobbyist pals write these regs specifically to destroy local, upstart competition; that’s what it means to be so out of touch.

The image of Liz Cheney, being reminded that she’s exempting herself from all the battles she calls into being is therefore a metaphor for much more than just the issue of foreign policy meddling.

It’s the entire problem of the distant regulatory state, this island of Laputa floating blissfully and uninterestedly above the world it purports to rule.  It’s the problem of too many decades of our nation being governed by a ruling class instead of benefiting from a government of our peers.

Upon his return to office, President Trump will appoint people to high office who live in the real world, not people from the ivory towers of academia, mass media, and bureaucracy. 

President Trump’s popular movement is to confront the Leviathan by populating government with real people — people with common sense and an appreciation for the Founding Fathers’ vision, people with the real-world experience of normal American families and churches, ranches and farms, factories and builders, and traditional family businesses again.  People who actually care about how their policies will affect the lives of their constituents.

No wonder the self-appointed decision-makers are shaking in their boots.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, and speaker.  Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his nonfiction book on the 2024 election, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.

Image: Liz Cheney.  Credit: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.