One thing. Trump stood on the stage and called out Bush. The rest of the field stood by and refused to say the war was a mistake. Both then and after the first debate.
Trump was very happy to call out Bush on Iraq, I quite agree, it was a big moment.
I don't recall everyone else refusing to call it a mistake, though.
You should show me that.
And his numbers shot up and continued to do so. Trump was happy to throw shit at the wall and see what stuck.
Yes, which is why your thought that the contractors would be against him for shit he threw at the wall is so odd.
By your own admission he wasn't a threat to them in any way.
Especially since, as I said, he repeatedly said he wanted a bigger military that would be more feared, and that people could pay the US to use.
His rallies were a stream of randomness that when the crowd reacted he went with it. I said before it was like watching a Wrestling Shoot( first 20 minutes of Monday Night Raw). With some evangelical flavor thrown in.
But imo it was the Iraq War call out that made him. That is the turning moment to his numbers rightvafter the first TV debate.
That's interesting.
I thought he was the front runner long before the first debate.
The contractors, party bosses, media, and others couldn't pin him down. They had no idea what he would do in office. Thats what they hated most.
That he was uncontrollable in many ways was absolutely something people worried about.
But that has nothing to do with him being "anti-war" in any way.
Like I said, if you want to argue that they were worried he would fuck up
their contracts and give them to other cronies or that he was so unstable he would start a war for stupid reasons or cause other things that would make their comfortable lives miserable, then sure. They all worried about him doing that and they were right. They had to work real hard to figure out how to deal with him (which turned out to be mostly easy, just flatter and bribe him).
But you are going to have to do a lot more work to convince me that :
1) His anti-Iraq statement is what caused him to win in the Primary or in the General (significantly more than all his other positions).
2) He was opposed by "military contractors" and so on because they thought he was anti-war/anti-military.
Yes, there are some VERY stupid people who believed in the whole "Donald the Dove" thing (See Peggy Noonan, I believe, for an example) but Trump himself repeatedly said he was pro-war and pro-military, he just thought wars should be fought more brutally and without pretense of nation building. Kill the bad guys, do war crimes so that they surrender, and then take their stuff to fund the war of conquest.
www.washingtonexaminer.com
thehill.com
