Natalie Kitroeff

He was saying, I love the troops.

It's terrible what's happened to veterans.

They've been so mistreated, and they've been mistreated by these really, really stupid leaders who, you know, can barely organize a one-car funeral, much less prosecute a war overseas.

That's right, because it seemed like a very literal interpretation of America first, which is we look inward.

We take care of people at home.

And in the meantime, consider the outside world only when it suits us.

But unless and until that happens, we take care of our folks at home.

Yes.

I mean, he realized, Natalie, that this was a winning message, that people really responded to it.

And so he realized as well that he could target his political opponent as the person who will prosecute endless wars.

He said that about Hillary Clinton.

He later said it about Kamala Harris.

He said that she would get us into a war with Iran.

And Trump, by the end of the 2024 campaign, was saying, I'm the peace president.

There will be no endless wars under my administration.

I didn't take us to war in my first term.

I won't take us to war in my second term.

You can count on it.

But the notion that Trump was the peace president, that we inferred that from the things that he had said about the Iraq war, I think proved to be really misguided.

I think that it was something that we fundamentally misunderstood about Trump and what you would call his ideology.