Ben Rhodes

And look, what's amazing about this is that

One of Trump's most effective arguments was this one against ending forever wars.

It was central to his rise, right?

When he dismantled Jeb Bush on the debate stage in 2015 over Iraq, no other Republican would, that's when he moved to the front of the pack.

Like he would not be president without his kind of repeated opposition to this idea of forever wars.

In the first term too, he was much more careful about the United States getting in conflicts.

He is now bombed

seven or eight countries, I've lost track, in just the first 13 months of his second term.

And he's proving to be not the kind of disruptive corrective to American imperialism and wars of aggression and forever wars.

If anything, he's proving to be the uber manifestation of it.

I mean, even these targets he's going after are kind of the old in the closet targets of hardline Republicans like Lindsey Graham, Venezuela, Iran,

Cuba, you know?

This is all the ancient history in the Republican hawk cupboard is coming out, and people know that, you know?

And nobody asked for this.

And tell me, I'd say, just to take another point that doesn't get discussed much, the price tag for this thing, I was talking to- Billions.

I was talking to somebody today who was suggesting to me that if it's just even like a few weeks, tens of billions, right?

This massive amount of military force moving and deploying into the Middle East and then all these munitions being used, maybe the damage that's being done.

We saw some damage to our facility in Bahrain.

I mean, do Americans want us to be spending tens of billions of dollars to aggrandize Donald Trump to go along with Bibi Netanyahu's obsession with killing the Supreme Leader and moving the Iranian regime?

Well, first of all, you're right, because we saw this build up for weeks.