"Brutal Americans"? The issue is that we've never been brutal enough — with the evil of the world or with those who would take advantage of us, as a nation or as taxpayers

A lot of people are tired of watching other countries ripping off the United States. This is a great country. They laugh at us. Behind our backs they laugh at us, because of our own stupidity and our leaders. … I think that it is an issue that ought to be brought out to the fore. … 

I believe it's very important that you have free trade. But we don't have free trade right now, because if you want to go to Japan or if you want to go to Saudi Arabia or various other countries [to European countries], it's virtually impossible for an American to do business in those countries — virtually impossible — I have many friends they go over to Japan they can't open anything, they need approvals, they need this, that. In the meantime, Japan comes over to this country, they're buying up Wall Street, they're buying up Manhattan real estate … So the fact is, we don't have free trade …  

 … There are many other countries, and taking tremendous advantage of this, including NATO. If you look at the payments that we're making to NATO, they're totally disproportionate with everybody else's, and it's ridiculous … not giving [the money] to countries that don't give a damn for us to start off with … [A development forecast for the future] going to be bad unless we do something about this horrible, horrendous deficit. 

— Donald Trump, Larry King Live, September 2, 1987

One of the big misconceptions of the 2024 election, both domestically and abroad, is that it is America — or, if you will, that it is President Trump — who is — gratuitously — starting economic conflicts with friends and allies when in reality he is reacting to (unfair) tariffs already in place against the United States. Although it is far from unfair to say that the imbalance has been going on for so long that foreigners and Americans alike have forgotten how it has developed into the status quo.

You cannot understand Donald Trump unless you take a look at the numerous interviews the "famed real estate developer" made in the decades before he ran for president. Although the main focus is not always in the political realm, in interviews with Larry King, David Letterman, and Oprah Winfrey, at some point he eventually complains of countries "ripping off the United States" (which invariably leads to the question whether he intends to run for president).

In that perspective, Tom Knighton hits the mark as he tells America — and the international community (first and foremost our European "friends") that The Problem Is We Haven't Been the 'Brutal American' Before (obrigado to Instapundit's Sarah Hoyt).

I'm not a warmonger. People die in war, and as a veteran and a father of someone who is still draft age, I'm not keen on sending people into war needlessly.

But when The Atlantic published a piece over the weekend referring to us as "the brutal American," I was a little miffed about it.

See, there's an argument to be made that the reason the world is such a fiasco as it stands right now is that we weren't brutal. We haven't put Iran in its place. We didn't truly pull out all of the stops going after the Taliban. We didn't really do much with ISIS. We stood aside throughout much of the Syrian civil war and mostly let nature take its course. We've allowed socialist Venezuela to fester in South America and we did nothing as the Cartels seized more and more territory in Mexico.

Those weren't our fights, you see, and we couldn't police the world. We weren't the brutal American and the world kept going to crap.

European nations refused to spend anything on their own defense, content that we Americans would always be there to save them. They looked down on us for not being sophisticated enough to embrace their soft socialist policies and infringements on rights. They'd ask when we were going to be sensible and restrict guns or start cracking down on hate speech or any of a thousand other petty tyrannies they used to judge us as the rubes who don't know what's best for us.

And we let them.

We allowed them to do that while cowering behind the shield we provided them. We were the knight in shining armor, valiantly standing between the ravenous horde of communism, and when that fell, we stayed because threats were still there. The Soviets were gone but Russia remained. China was still there.

After the Gulf War, they weren't eager to fight, and our presence was enough, but our "allies" still thought of themselves as our betters. They were the aristocrats and we were the pawns.

We were not brutal with their sensibilities. We were not brutal with the dictators and tyrants we allowed to flourish. We were not brutal with the evil of the world or those who would take advantage of us, as a nation or as taxpayers.

Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic called us the "brutal Americans" as if that is something we should be ashamed of.

Personally, considering that all of it stems from President Trump not playing along with the status quo in the world, I'm fine with that term. 

The issue is that we've never been brutal enough.

I've long thought we, as a nation, should be slow to anger, but when we are, we should descend upon our enemies with the fiery hand of God. 

I have often said that the national anthem should not be The Star-Spangled Banner; it ought to be The Battle Hymn of the Republic (something agreed with by people as various as Harry Jaffa and Robert F Kennedy Sr, who promised to make it so in the 1960s).

Our wrath should serve as a warning to all who would threaten liberty that to do so is to invite destruction, unlike anything you have ever seen. We should leave a scar upon the psyches of the vanquished meant to last a thousand years.

 … I say we embrace the role of the brutal American if that's what it takes. We will not be taken advantage of anymore. We will not be ignored, looked down upon, or treated as less than on the world stage, especially by those who have taken no steps over decades of pleading to manage their own defense.

Related: The Censorship Industrial Complex — Vance's Message to Europe Was in Fact "Stop secret information warfare against the United States"

Not limited to slavery, Jim Crow laws, and legal segregation: Using lawfare against political opponents is nothing new for Democrats

In the American Spectator's This Mess Is of Your Own Making, Chief Justice Roberts (thanks to Sarah Hoyt), Scott McKay links to Francis P. Sempa's A Short History of Democratic Party Lawfare: 

The party’s use of the criminal justice system to maintain political power dates back to slavery.

Many Republicans and conservatives have accused today’s Democratic Party of using “lawfare” against President Donald Trump and his supporters. They claim that this use of lawfare against a political opponent is unprecedented. But it is not unprecedented. What follows is a short history of the Democratic Party’s use of lawfare to attain and maintain political power.

The Democratic Party’s use of law and the criminal justice system to maintain political power dates back to the “peculiar institution” of slavery. It is often ignored or deliberately forgotten that the Democratic Party was the party of slavery. In the states of the Deep South and elsewhere, Democratic Party legislators enshrined slavery into law, Democratic executives enforced those laws, and Democratic judges upheld those laws against legal and constitutional challenges. Democratic presidents like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson were slaveholders. So were many Democratic governors. It was Democrats who insisted on passage of the Fugitive Slave Act as part of the Compromise of 1850. It was a Democratic Supreme Court Chief Justice (Roger Taney) who wrote the court’s opinion (Scott v. Sanford, known as the Dred Scott case) upholding slavery and declaring African Americans to be chattel.

It was Democratic Party state and local officials that in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction imposed so-called “Jim Crow” laws in many states of the Deep South. Indeed, as part of a deal for not continuing to challenge the controversial presidential election of 1876 (which included two sets of electors in three contested states and a Republican majority commission that awarded the 20 disputed electoral votes to Rutherford B. Hayes), Democrats insisted on an end to Reconstruction, which allowed them to pass and enforce segregationist laws. As African American populations rose in the south, this was a mechanism for oppression, control, and maintaining Democratic Party political supremacy. And when southerners took the law into their own hands by lynching African Americans, it was local, state, and national Democratic political leaders who ensured that anti-lynching bills did not become laws, and that rigged juries would acquit the murderers of African Americans. At the national level, Democratic control of key congressional committee chairmanships ensured the defeat of effective Civil Rights bills for decades until 1964 — Robert Caro’s multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson goes into great detail as to how this worked.

Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, a rabid racist, authorized segregation within the federal government. Franklin Roosevelt refused to support anti-lynching laws. Democratic Senate leader Robert Byrd was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan. So was Democratic Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. Democratic governors like George Wallace and Lester Maddox — to name just two — were openly segregationist.

Lawfare was not limited to slavery, Jim Crow laws, and legal segregation. Democrat Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order that forcibly removed more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry from their homes on the West Coast and interned them in camps during World War II, a Democratic Party-controlled Congress legislated in support of that order, and a majority-Democratic Party Supreme Court upheld this massive legal and constitutional injustice. Democratic Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson used the IRS to investigate political opponents. More recently, Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did this, too.

Lawfare was also involved in the Democratic-led coup (known as Watergate) against President Richard Nixon, this time with the full-throated support of the mainstream media, who hated Nixon ever since he helped to expose Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. Geoff Shepard in several books has revealed the collusion between Democratic congressional staffers, the Democratic Party-staffed special counsel’s office, senior FBI agents, and federal judges, to prosecute Nixon’s staffers and ultimately remove Nixon from office.

So using lawfare against political opponents is nothing new for Democrats.

Related: A Century and Half of Apartheid Policies — From Its 1828 Foundation, the Democrat Party Has Never Shed Its Racist Past 

Also: • What Caused Secession and Ergo the Civil War? Was It Slavery and/or States' Rights? Or Wasn't It Rather Something Else — the Election of a Ghastly Republican to the White House?
• During the Winter of 1860-1861, Did the South's Democrats Obtain Their Aim — the Secession of 7 Slave States — Thanks to Elections Filled with Stealth, Lies, Voter Fraud, Intimidation, Violence, and Murder? (Wait 'til You Hear About… Georgia's Dark Secret)
• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"
• The Greatest Myth in U.S. History: Yes, the Civil War Era Did Feature Champions of States' Rights, But No, They Were Not in the South (Au Contraire)
• Harry Jaffa on the Civil War Era: For Democrats of the 21st Century as of the 19th, "the emancipation from morality was/is itself seen as moral progress"
• Why Does Nobody Ever Fret About Scandinavia's — Dreadful — 19th-C Slavery Conditions?
• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History
• How to Prevent America from Becoming a Totalitarian State
• Inside of a month, Democrats have redefined riots and election challenges from the highest form of patriotism to an attack on democracy — And by “democracy”, they mean the Democrat Party
• Why They Don't Tell You the Whole Truth: The 1619 Project Summarized in One Single Sentence