Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump insisted various times in his interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that “mass deportation” will be a center of his government policy, should he win the Presidency. It came up various times, but when Bartiromo asked what would be the first thing he would do to get America’s strength back on the international stage, Trump shot back: Close off the border and then there must be a mass deportation, that must be done. She asked: Can you deport 8 to 10 million people? That he didn’t answer, other than to reference that when Dwight Eisenhower deported people 2,000 miles away, they did not come back.
Notably, Middle East policy was not much discussed. Without even mentioning the glaring sore of Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, Bartiromo asked if he would continue funding for Israel. Trump responded that “we always have to protect Israel… They’ve done amazing things and they’ve been loyal to us.”
He also firmly defended his order to assassinate Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Commander of the Revolutionary Guards Quds Brigade and Iranian national hero, calling the decision absolutely necessary. That order was carried out by U.S. military forces when Soleimani was in Iraq on Jan. 3, 2020.
In the case of Iran, as with China, Trump insisted that it is only by such shows of force that the U.S. gains “respect” around the world. He deludes himself that Iran “respected” his government after national hero Soleimani was murdered, and was about “to make a deal” out of “respect” if he had been reelected in 2020. When referencing U.S. problems in Iraq today, he repeated that his advice originally had been that the U.S. should not go into Iraq, but if it did, it should take its oil—the cruel strategy which his government carried out in neighboring Syria.
As for China, he talked out of both sides of his mouth. He said that he had gotten along fine with President Xi Jinping as President, while repeating FBI claims that the Chinese Communist Party is sending tens of thousands of young, military-age Chinese men into the U.S., maybe to set up an army, and that must be dealt with, mooting that he could slap greater-than-60% tariffs on Chinese imports, if necessary to get their “respect.”
Such a Thrasymachus-modeled world, where power induces “respect,” is long gone.
