“What will we get for bombing Syria besides more debt and a possible long term conflict? Obama needs Congressional approval.” Donald J. Trump, August 29, 2013, Twitter.

Perhaps Donald Trump should start re-reading his own tweets and take his own advice. Of course Trump’s failure to follow the Constitution with respect to waging war is the least troublesome aspect of the US’s latest incursion into Syria (Presidents have been doing this since Reagan). What’s more frightening is that Trump can be so easily manipulated by such an obvious attempt at foreign policy puppetry by the Deep State (aka The Swamp, the entrenched unelected bureaucrats of the various intelligence agencies both foreign and domestic).

Just step back for a second and consider what we have witnessed this past few weeks. On March 29 Trump announced plans to begin pulling US troop presence out of Syria (much to the consternation of his hawkish advisors e.g the war monger John Bolton) and by that evening he already began to back pedal on that promise. Then a mere 7 days later there was an apparent chemical weapons attack by Syrian forces against rebel groups putatively ordered by Assad. For Assad tactically this makes no sense. So an occupying force in your country, whom you do not want there, says they are leaving and your first instinct is to do something so belligerently provocative that said occupying force would have no alternative but to stay? That does not benefit Assad at all. But do you know who it does benefit? It benefits the war hawks who are plugged into the military industrial complex (that Eisenhower so presciently warned us of) looking to enhance their own fiscal or power gains. Or the sad ideologues who still drink their own lemonade of believing they can somehow transform the Middle East into some sort of Western Democratic utopia. Yeah, because that model has worked so well in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So while there was much conflicting information on the ground coming out of Syria about who carried out these attacks or whether they even took place at all, the war hawks realized they must strike fast while emotions were still running hot lest they lose the wind filling the sails of the ships headed toward war. On this past Friday the US launched a strike against supposed Syrian chemical weapons sites. Unfortunately they (and we) may get a lot more than they bargained for. Russia clearly and unequivocally warned that any such strikes would be met with an equal response. For those unfamiliar with World War I, this is exactly how World Wars get started. Each side drawing lines in the sand and gathering ever larger groups of allies on both sides. As each side begins to escalate their responses we may quickly find ourselves embroiled in nuclear war. And for what? For nothing. For either a blatant lie or for an internal heinous act that is quite frankly not in any way related to the defense or security of the United States. It would be like Russia stating it is in Russian security interests to bomb ATF headquarters after our government slaughtered innocent civilians and children in Waco, Texas.

If Trump is truly concerned with ending the deaths of innocents perhaps he should end our support of Saudi Arabia in their incursion into Yemen that is resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of Yemenis children. Oh, but the Saudis are our allies, so that makes it ok when they slaughter innocents. Right, got it, murder is ok when it’s our friends. Donald Trump is just Hillary Clinton with tax cuts. As a New York Times best-selling author and historian Thomas Woods says, “No matter who elect you always get John McCain.”