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Donald Trump’s pitch to “Make America Great Again” included a commitment to rethinking America’s interventionist foreign policy.

“After the Cold War, our foreign policy veered badly off course,” then-candidate Trump told an audience at the Center for the National Interest in April 2016. “Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance, and this led to one foreign policy disaster after another.”

Trump’s promise to unwind America’s foreign commitments won the vote of some anti-war libertarians, who argued that, while many of his political views were odious, foreign policy mattered most.

“Donald [Trump] is a peacenik, practically, certainly compared to the war-mongering Hillary [Clinton],” libertarian economist Walter Block told the audience at a November 2016 debate over whether libertarians should support Trump, which was hosted by the Soho Forum.

On the campaign trail, Trump also attacked Clinton for voting to authorize the invasion of Iraq as a senator, for pushing for U.S. intervention in Libya as secretary of state, and for her hawkish approach to foreign policy in general.

“Almost everything [Hillary Clinton] has done in foreign policy has been a mistake, and it’s been a disaster,” Trump said in an October 2016 debate.

In a November 2016 Reason podcast, historian Thaddeus Russell made the case that Trump would prove to be the less interventionist alternative to Clinton.

“Whenever there’s a dictator or tyrant [America doesn’t] like in any part of the world, we are obligated to remove him,” Russell said. “Trump is the first president to call bullshit on that very claim…And in doing so, I think he may do great service for actual peace.”

But now that we’re ending his presidential term, do noninterventionists believe Trump actually has moved the world closer to peace?

“I think Trump has moved America considerably closer to peace,” says Russell. “At the very same time, he’s moved us into more wars. So it’s a terribly mixed bag.”

But Russell says that Trump’s rhetoric alone still was an important victory for the noninterventionist cause.

“He called into question the need for America to invade countries, to change their regimes and to stay there…Specifically, he called into question the Iraq war.”

Trump isn’t the first modern president to promise an end to foreign entanglements on the campaign trail only to double down on those commitments once in office. Candidate Barack Obama called the Iraq War “dumb” and promised to end it.

Obama temporarily withdrew troops from Iraq on Bush’s pre-negotiated timetable, but then re-intervened a few years later after ISIS filled the power vacuum. He also expanded the war on terror into several new countries and began personally ordering covert drone strikes, one of which killed a 16-year-old American, and another that killed at least 13 people headed to a wedding.

Even George W. Bush, who as president started the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ran against nation-building on the campaign trail.

“I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, ‘We do it this way. So should you,'” Bush said in a 2000 debate.

Scott Horton, a popular anti-war podcast host and author of a book on the history of the war in Afghanistan, says modern presidents often campaign against war because it’s a popular position in the abstract.

“The American people want peace,” says Horton.

He agrees with Russell that Trump’s rhetorical attack on the foreign policy establishment, and specifically on Jeb Bush and the Iraq war, helped the anti-war cause.

“He really got the…Tea Party, Republican voters of America to finally admit that they were wrong to have supported George Bush,” says Horton.

But he says Trump is too impulsive to be reliably anti-war.

“The problem with Donald Trump, of course, is that he’s a millimeter deep,” says Horton. “He has some instincts, but he doesn’t have…thinking really on these things.”

Trump’s wars with the media, Democrats, and protesters have meant that Americans are paying less attention than ever to our actual wars, which nevertheless are still being waged.

Trump hasn’t invaded any new countries, but he has ramped up the nearly 19-year-long, $2 trillion Afghanistan war that’s cost the lives of tens of thousands of Afghanis and more than 3,500 U.S. and NATO troops.

Trump deployed thousands more troops to Afghanistan in 2017 and dropped more bombs and missiles in 2019 than in any previously recorded year.

“Once they get in there, all the incentives are to keep the [wars] going,” says Horton. “Afghanistan is the greatest example of this.”

Instead of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria once he took office, Trump vowed to stop publicly reporting troop numbers. 

The Trump administration did strike a deal with Taliban leaders in late February to wind down the war within 14 months if they pledged to prevent terrorist groups like al Qaeda from operating in the country, and the Pentagon announced a reduction in forces and withdrawal from five Afghanistan bases on July 14.

“The fact that Trump was willing to break with Bush and Obama’s policy to go ahead and negotiate directly with the Taliban was a clue that he was really serious,” says Horton.

But he worries that deal could be scuttled by uncorroborated reports that Russia paid bounties to Afghanis who killed U.S. troops, which prompted Republican Liz Cheney to partner with several House Democrats to place conditions on the withdrawal.

Horton also points out that Trump has increased U.S. involvement in Yemen and Somalia. In Yemen alone, the United Nations estimates that the Saudi-led and U.S.-supported bombing campaign has resulted in almost a quarter of a million deaths.

“These are two of America’s most horrible wars and no one pays any attention to them whatsoever,” says Horton.

Trump has continued and escalated the war on terror, which could make the U.S. susceptible to getting involved in even more conflicts around the globe. He also undid Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and ordered a targeted assassination of Iranian Gen. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, whom he accused of plotting an attack on an American base.

But after Iran fired back, Trump backed off. He pulled back a strike in 2019 after Iran downed a U.S. drone, and political allies and media commentators portrayed it as a weakness. He faced widespread criticism for moving troops out of northern Syria and praise when he fired missiles into a Syrian airfield after allegations of a chemical attack by Bashar al-Assad.

“Look at the narrative and the agenda in the media,” says Horton. “How dare Donald Trump try to end any of America’s wars ever.”

Russell worries about the increasingly belligerent rhetoric on both sides of the aisle towards China. Trump has escalated tensions with China through his trade war and  the reported placement of low-yield nuclear weapons in the region. But Russell still believes Trump’s rhetoric was useful.

“The best aspect of the foreign policy of Trump is that…he has revealed the mind of not just the foreign policy establishment…[but] really government workings and the workings of the state,” says Russell. “The worst aspect of the Trump foreign policy is that he’s a mass murderer, just like the rest of them.”

In the end, Trump, as commander in chief, has had ample opportunity to begin making good on his promise to begin extricating the American military from its endless wars. Time and again, he has failed to formulate a coherent strategy for doing so.

“It never should have been this way. We screwed up, got the whole 21st century off on the wrong foot,” says Horton. “But we didn’t need to. We could call the whole damn thing off…and just forge that new [foreign policy] consensus and stick with it. It should be easy because we’re right.”

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Graphics by Lex Villena and Isaac Reese.

Photo credits: “Liz Cheney,” Stefani Reynolds/CNP/MEGA/ Newscom; “Mother at military funeral,” Kevin Dietsch/UPI/Newscom; “Carrying flag-draped casket,” Kevin Dietsch/Newscom; “Woman at veteran’s gravesite,” Michael A. McCoy/ZUMA Press/Newscom; “Trump and Jeb Bush at debate,” Max Wittaker/UPI/Newscom; “Trump holding up fists,” Yin Bogu Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; “Chinese ballistic missile,” Kyodo/Newscom; “Donald Trump campaigning at podium,” by Gage Skidmore

Music credits: “Truth or Reality,” “Temerity,” “Unforeseen,” “To Begin Again,” by Sean Williams licensed by Artlist. 

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Nationwide protests following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police were met, in many cities, by even more police violence. In York City, dozens of incidents in which police responded with excessive force were caught on camera. But so far, the department says only four NYPD cops have been disciplined.

The NYPD has had excessive force problems for years and years, but even folks familiar with cases of NYPD misconduct may still be surprised to learn that the department continues to twiddle its thumbs in the midst of an unprecedented protest movement.

On Twitter over the past several months, T. Greg Doucette did yeoman’s work tracking and maintaining a thread of hundreds of violent responses by police directed toward protesters, media covering protesters, and people just in the vicinity of the protests. His thread currently ends at 775 tweets.

It looks like many people used these protests as an excuse to lash out and engage in violent and dangerous behavior. Some of them were rioters and looters breaking into stores and setting fires. And some others were men and women in uniform, carrying badges and guns, looking for a reason to hit people.

The New York Times has looked over video footage showing the NYPD responding to protesters (some of which they gathered from Doucette’s feed) and found case after case of officers shoving, beating, and violently assaulting people who do not appear to be engaging in illegal behavior or, often, even resisting the police. They looked at 60 incidences of troubling behavior by NYPD officers in just the first 10 days of protests.

In one video, in less than a minute, the same police officer harshly shoves an unresisting protester to the pavement, pushes a cyclist, and then picks up and body slams a third protester who was standing and pointing at the gathered police officers as they were apparently breaking up a protest. In another, police beat a man on the ground after chasing him, and one even steps on the man’s neck, notable given that Floyd died from having an officer kneel on his neck for several minutes.

The Times looked over video of police just randomly lashing out and shoving people as they walked by them. They found a video of police officers slamming a man to the ground after he had been arrested and they were leading him away. They found video footage of an NYPD officer grabbing a man and hurling him into a parked car, but not arresting him, and just leaving his body on the street.

And despite the constant refrain from police that these are “isolated incidents,” the Times found behavior repeating itself and multiple examples of each questionably violent response from police.

The Times acknowledges that the videos lack full context, and we don’t see what happened before or after these violent outbursts. But they also note that the city’s policing guidelines order officers to use only the amount of reasonable force “necessary to gain control or custody of a subject.”

An NYPD spokesperson told the Times that four officers have been disciplined for their conduct during the protests in late May and early June, and the department is investigating 51 other instances of possible protest-related police misconduct. The spokesperson declined to actually watch or respond to any specific videos. The Police Benevolent Union that represents most NYPD officers also declined to respond to the Times.

But experts were willing to look over the videos at the Times behest, and while they found some uses of force acceptable (to detain those who were trying to evade arrest), many other incidents raised concerns.

“A lot of this was ‘street justice,'” Philip M. Stinson told the Times. Stinson is a criminologist at Bowling Green University and a former police officer who focuses on studying police use of forces. He saw many of these cases as “gratuitous acts of extrajudicial violence doled out by police officers on the street to teach somebody a lesson.” He described some of the tactics he saw as “sloppy” and “downright criminal.”

Weeks after the protests, people in New York City (and elsewhere) are still capturing and distributing disturbing footage of NYPD misconduct. Here’s police body camera footage from late May that was publicly released Tuesday showing a transit officer getting shockingly violent when a homeless man mildly resisted getting tossed off a train for the crime of taking up more than one seat (even though the train car was mostly empty):

A homeless man left a crowded shelter the night of May 25 and sat on the train with a few tote bags. Cops told him to leave. Then: https://t.co/DJQ3oK4Eha pic.twitter.com/6j5UGDDZmu

— Rosa Goldensohn (@RosaGoldensohn) July 15, 2020

The transit officers then pepper-sprayed the man while he was simply standing against a wall in the train station terrified and begging them to stop. He required medical treatment after the encounter. More body camera footage can be viewed here.

Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance’s office responded to this encounter by filing felony assault charges not against the officer but against the homeless man, identified only as Joseph T. by New York media outlet The City.

Joseph was arrested for resisting arrest and “obstructing government administration.”  Arresting officer Adonis Long claimed that while they were cuffing him on the platform, Joseph kicked Long’s right hand. As a result, Long “sustained swelling and substantial pain to the knuckles of his right hand and was transported to the hospital.” And so prosecutors subsequently added felony assault charges. The video, meanwhile, shows Long striking Joseph across the face twice before dragging him off the train. Maybe that’s how he hurt his hand?

Even as his office defends overcharging a homeless man, Vance says he supports efforts to defund and scale back policing. Just last week he penned an op-ed in the New York Amsterdam News, writing in part:

In light of the recent killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks, it is unquestionable that substantial community reinvestment is essential to our era’s antiracist criminal justice reckoning, and that grassroots organizations based in communities of color severely harmed by police violence and unnecessary incarceration should receive the bulk of funds divested from law enforcement.

Reinvesting taxpayer dollars into our historically underserved communities of color demonstrates that municipal leaders are listening and acting on the democratic principle of the “consent of the governed,” which holds that the moral right to use state power is only justified to the extent that our constituents consent to it. So too do other actions taken by state and city governments, including banning police use of chokeholds, making police misconduct reports public, and ending qualified immunity. But these actions over the past weeks don’t suggest our work, as government and law enforcement leaders, is anywhere close to healing centuries of trauma caused by systemic racism in our justice system.

It’s unclear how terrorizing a homeless man on a train helps achieve these goals Vance says he supports. Going after the rotten cops captured on video seems to better fit the bill.

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At least eight people across the country were hit in the face with rubber bullets and other less-lethal projectiles during the May 30 anti-police brutality protests that erupted after the death of George Floyd. Videos of these partial blindings, which challenge official statements put out by the various police departments, were released yesterday by The Washington Post.

While many of the departments involved claimed to have deployed rubber bullets, tear gas, and other less-lethal munitions to disperse protesters who were throwing objects at officers, footage from the incidents show many people who were partially blinded posed no “obvious threat” to police.

Before Balin Brake was struck in the eye by a tear gas canister in Fort Wayne, Indiana, video shows him standing with his hands in the air and then running away with other protesters. Brake turned his head for a moment to check the scene behind him when he was hit in the face with a tear gas canister. Other protesters helped him away from the scene.

Following the incident, the Fort Wayne Police Department issued a statement saying Brake was bending over to pick up a gas canister, presumably to throw it back towards police (in their telling), when a second canister was deployed, bounced, and hit him in the eye. Yet slow-motion video does not show Brake bending over, nor does it show the second canister bouncing on the ground.

Linda Tirado, a freelance photojournalist, was also included in the report. After being hit in the eye with what she believed to be a rubber bullet while covering a Minneapolis protest, Tirado described the sensation as her face “exploding.” Tirado was struck after putting her camera down for a moment between shots. She was carried away by protesters and was later informed by a doctor that she is unlikely to ever recover her sight.

Use of force incidents during anti-brutality protests have renewed criticisms of the use of kinetic impact projectiles such as rubber bullets.

As Reason has previously reported, less-lethal munitions like rubber bullets can contain metal cores and are covered by rubber, plastic, and other materials. These munitions can cause penetrative damage and lacerations, both of which are contrary to their marketed use.

Footage from anti-police brutality protests shared on social media has highlighted the gruesome bodily injuries that can be sustained from such rounds. And while law enforcement describes rubber bullets as “non-lethal” or “less-lethal,” 15 percent of rubber bullet injuries resulted in permanent damage—there is even risk of death if struck in the face.

Manufacturers and some law enforcement departments encourage officers to aim for lower extremities, such as buttocks and thighs, but videos like those collected by The Washington Post have shown officers failing to properly use these munitions.

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