Trump: America First, c’est moi

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty told Alice scornfully, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less. The question is which is to be master – that’s all.” This is an important angle to understanding that America First is whatever Donald Trump says it is, at the time that he says it. His declaration that he is the master of the term, and defines it according to what he sees as America’s interest on a moveable basis, is in no way inconsistent with the foreign policy of his first term or his second: he makes decisions, sometimes snap decisions, based on what he sees as choices standing to benefit the country. 

The criticism of Trump’s foreign policies as Lindberghian isolationism were always a joke – they’ve never been that, and the truth is the same people who raise those smears do so of just about anyone on the right whose policies they find insufficiently hawkish. But it is also true that many who publicly represent themselves as Trump-whisperers on questions of foreign policy were nothing of the kind. They were just people who occasionally came into the president’s orbit who had opinions about what he should do – just as everyone else who walks into the Oval Office does on a daily basis. 

Trump’s rejection of these outside voices as the arbiters and definers of America First’s meaning was unequivocal, and in a knife-twisting fashion, given of all places to the blob-entity “suckers and losers” writers at the Atlantic:

“Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides that,” Trump said. “For those people who say they want peace – you can’t have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon. So for all of those wonderful people who don’t want to do anything about Iran having a nuclear weapon – that’s not peace.

The President’s decision to publicly take ownership of this doctrine, reframed as something whose scope is defined entirely by him, has the benefit of clarity. All the thumb-sucking over Trump’s foreign-policy doctrine over the past near-decade was just a waste of time. America First isn’t a brand to be farmed out to junior members for dilution and re-envisioning according to their personal priorities. It is what Donald Trump says it is, end of story. If you want to complain about it, go on Twitch.