What Kind of ‘America First’ Is This?

Politics

What Kind of ‘America First’ Is This?

Donald Trump suddenly looks and sounds a lot like George W. Bush.

The Washington Commanders were getting absolutely throttled by the Seattle Seahawks on Sunday Night Football when I decided to flip over and listen to the tail end of President Donald Trump’s first appearance on 60 Minutes in nearly five years. CBS hadn’t been on the television for longer than a minute before host Norah O’Donnell asked Trump about Venezuela and its pesky leader Nicolás Maduro. 

“They’ve been treating us very badly,” Trump said before complaining about the “hundreds of thousands” of prisoners and mentally ill patients that Maduro allegedly dumped into the United States over the last few years “because Joe Biden was the worst president in the history of our country.” Trump said that, although he “doubted” the U.S. would engage in a full-scale war with the South American nation, he couldn’t yet rule out land strikes and that he expected Maduro to soon be exercised from his position as leader of Venezuela. 

“I would say yeah, I think so, yeah,” Trump responded when O’Donnell asked if Maduro’s “days were numbered.” So much for “no new wars.” That was the campaign trail; there’s not much that any of us naive voters can do about it now is there? Time to buckle up, sit back, and enjoy three more unyielding years of the new neocon cinema. 

Trump’s take on Venezuela was only part of a string of interventionist comments that the 47th president made during his short interview with O’Donnell. Trump praised Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling him a “very talented guy” who wasn’t being treated appropriately. Trump added that Netanyahu is under trial, something he characterized as “very unfair,” before noting Trump and the U.S. government would “be involved” in helping Netanyahu however they could. 

That’s right. Netanyahu, a man responsible for overseeing one of the bloodiest campaigns of the modern era, is the one who is getting “very unfair” treatment. Trump made no mention of the Palestinian people or the nearly 70,000 human beings estimated to have died in the Gaza Strip since Netanyahu began his nonstop campaign of starvation and death after the Hamas attack that ruthlessly snuffed out the lives of 1,200. 

It’s worth pointing out that one wrong does not make another wrong right. Both Hamas and Israel have blood on their hands, but our president has chosen to only wash clean the blights of one fighting group while consistently attacking the other. This has made the U.S. and all 350 million of its citizens complicit in a war that is not our own. And Trump’s rhetoric has squarely placed our country on the side of the Israelis, despite public opinion running counter. “If they don’t behave, they’re going to be taken out immediately,” Trump said of Hamas during his 60 Minutes interview. No such comments were uttered about Netanyahu or the state of Israel. 

As Americans, our greatest battles lie here in the heartland, thousands of miles from Jerusalem, Tehran, the Gaza Strip, and the rest of the chaotic world out there. We, the people of America, have little interest spending our days debating the crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israel or Hamas or the ulterior motives of the mullahs and crown princes of the Muslim kingdoms. We have enough issues here, in Pennsylvania, Idaho, Missouri, and California. It is here, not in the Middle East, where Americans are struggling to afford rising grocery prices and unaffordable housing costs. These United States are where Trump and his administration’s aims should be focused, not between the Golan Heights and Tehran.  

And yet when asked about such apparently trivial domestic issues by O’Donnell, Trump merely waved his hand and claimed that grocery prices, despite what our eyes and pocketbooks clearly tell us, are, in fact, falling; even if they aren’t, it is all President Biden’s fault. Nice. Nothing like a healthy dose of partisanship as the winter approaches. That’ll help the Walmart caste. Such is the MAGA that we have received: a shadow of the MAGA promised. A man who probably hasn’t visited a grocery store in decades, who has his run-around help do the shopping for him, lectures the rest of us about what reality in Middle America looks and feels like. And if you think I’m exaggerating the bleak outlook on the domestic front, look no further than essentially every major pollster not named Rasmussen, all of whom are suddenly finding Trump severely underwater on most issues, especially inflation and the economy. 

In a CBS News/YouGov survey released Sunday that sampled 2,124 U.S. adults interviewed October 29–31, 2025, Trump posted personal record lows on the economy and inflation. On the economy, 62 percent of those surveyed disapprove of Trump’s handling of issues and 66 percent disapprove of his management of inflation. 51 percent of respondents said they felt “worse off” financially since Trump took office in January while only 18 percent responded that they felt “better off.” 

During an appearance with the CNN host Jake Tapper on Sunday morning, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent did little to ward off those startling numbers from CBS. “There are sectors of the economy that are in recession,” Bessent said after admitting that the U.S. economy is “in a transition period.” Bessent argued that any worrisome data is the result of the Trump administration scaling back spending from the Biden years. But data from consumer-facing stocks finds large segments of the American economy down 20 percent on the year as only the hype behind AI companies continues to drive the Dow Jones Industrial Average into record territory.

And though holders of Nvidia stock may be racking in the big money, normal Americans, the hundreds of millions who aren’t overleveraged in data centers, useless crypto, and computer graphic chips, are struggling to hold on to what they have. New numbers from Ritholtz wealth management show just how wide the gap between the haves and the have nots has truly become. The top 10 percent of US households now own 87 percent of all U.S. stocks, with the top 1 percent alone owning 50 percent. By comparison, the bottom 50 percent of households hold only 1 percent of all U.S. stocks. So while Trump beats his chest about rocketing stocks, the vast majority of Americans aren’t benefitting from “numbers go up” at all.

And then there’s the housing market. According to new figures published by real estate brokerage firm Redfin, only 2.8 percent of homes changed hands in the first nine months of 2025, about 28 per 1,000. That’s the lowest turnover in at least 30 years. Furthermore, only one out of 100 homes in New York and Los Angeles turned over in the first eight months of the year. Housing issues and the insolvency of the middle and lower class were supposed to be the big programs of the MAGA project, not fighting every country over antique religious doctrines. But no worry, at some point all the good-hearted AI and crypto billionaires will surely bail us all out.

Speaking of crypto billionaires, Trump was asked during his 60 Minutes interview about a very specific crypto billionaire who received a pardon from our president in October—Changpeng Zhao, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance. “I don’t know who he is,” Trump told O’Donnell. It was a strange admission of ignorance from a president who has suggested bills authorized during Biden’s administration are null and void because “sleepy Joe” used an autopen to sign legislation as his mental faculties failed him. “Here’s the thing, I know nothing about it because I’m too busy,” Trump continued, suggesting that Zhao, who goes by CZ for short, was probably given a pardon because Trump’s sons “are into” cryptocurrency. 

CZ was sentenced to four months in prison by the Biden administration in April 2024 after pleading guilty to violating American money-laundering laws. Though Trump told O’Donnell he doesn’t know who CZ is, he in the same breath told the CBS host that the sentence was “a witch hunt” conducted by the Biden administration. Following Trump’s presidential victory in November of 2024, Binance formed a high-level task force and took steps to prop up the Trump family’s nascent cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial. In the spring of 2025, with Trump in the Oval Office, World Liberty Financial’s market capitalization shot up from $127 million to over $2.1 billion, helped along by the promotion it received from Binance. Which is why O’Donnell pushed back when Trump acted as if he had never heard of CZ. It simply didn’t make sense.

But for Trump, who lives a well-insulated lifestyle among billionaires and the crypto-rich, denialism has become a common calling card of his administration. With millions of Americans about to fall off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program without court intervention, Trump attended a Roaring ’20s themed Great Gatsby party at Mar-a-Lago on Halloween that featured half-naked dancers romping to ABBA. For a political movement so concerned with the alleged degeneracy of the “radical left,” the festivities at Mar-a-Lago were just more evidence that so much of the Trump movement is simply window dressing. 

The truth is, despite daily proclamations from Trump that his administration has solved inflation and that the all-time high stock market means Americans are wealthier and more secure than ever, nearly 50 percent of Americans, according to a new POLITICO poll, now believe the American dream no longer exists. And while the collective right has lost its mind over the rise of the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York City, with many ultraconservative blowhards threatening to deport the Muslim progressive from our country, his ascension is a clear bellwether that the American people are ready to give just about any crazed idea a chance if it means eggs and gas and rent in this country actually do fall in price.

And so, as I spent 20-odd minutes listening to Trump threaten Maduro and defend Netanyahu and claim that every domestic issue is still somehow Biden’s fault, I couldn’t help but sense that things aren’t exactly heading in the direction many of us had hoped for last November. And that was all before I glanced over at my X feed where I saw yet another clip of Trump discussing the plight of people in a country far, far away and threatening to use American troops to set it right. This time he was discussing Nigeria and the “mass slaughter” of Christians that is occurring in the West African nation. 

“They’re killing record numbers of Christians in Nigeria,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “We’re not going to allow that to happen.”

After claiming that 3,100 Christians have been killed in Nigeria, Trump told reporters that U.S. troops “could” very well end up on the ground in the country. His sudden calls for action to curb the chaos follows pressure from prominent evangelical Christians in Congress such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to act against Boko Haram, a Muslim militant group in the nation that has been accused of killing tens of thousands of (mostly Muslim) Nigerians. But Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu pushed back against the idea that Christians were being targeted in his country.

“The characterization of Nigeria as religiously intolerant does not reflect our national reality, nor does it take into consideration the consistent and sincere efforts of the government to safeguard freedom of religion and beliefs for all Nigerians,” Tinubu said in a statement responding to Trump’s comments.

Yet again, here was our “America First” commander-in-chief involving our people and our troops and our money in the problems of others 5,000 miles away from our closest shore at the behest of a group of religiously motivated evangelicals in Congress.

Then came Monday morning when news leaked of the Trump administration’s plan to send U.S. troops into Mexico to target the drug cartels. Two current U.S. officials who spoke to NBC said that the planning stage for an invasion is well underway. All of it, from Nigeria to Venezuela to Mexico to Israel to CZ, is eerily reminiscent of the horrid days of the neocons, when the evangelical right dictated the ins and outs of a foreign policy meant purely to bleed the globe of its treasures under the cover of safety and security. 

In fact, the more we hear from Trump during his second term, the more it reminds those listening of how a former Republican once wielded his political capital and rhetoric. That Republican, of course, was a man Trump once rightfully mocked, George W. Bush, who left Washington as one of the most reviled characters to ever call the Oval Office home. Much like W. (and H.W., for that matter) Trump is now spending considerable energy arguing about and meddling in the trials and tribulations of other nations and peoples to satisfy the whims of wealthy Christian lobbying groups. It’s not what Trump promised on the campaign trail. It helps to explain why his disapproval rating, at 63 percent according to CNN, is numerically the highest of either of his terms. 

That anger isn’t random; it’s the result of running a campaign filled with populist promises and then immediately placing the wants and desires of foreign countries before the outstretched hands of our own people. And economic projects such as funneling $20 billion to Argentina in an effort to stabilize the libertarian President Javier Milei’s shaky economy have done little to thwart the growing complaints of frustrated Americans.

Trump still has time to turn things around, but, given the proud rhetoric he displayed last night, and the close friendship he has developed with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a noted neocon and war hawk, America is likely to be in for a big dose of the old song and dance—the one where black suits in Washington, DC push our military weight around beyond our borders while hardworking Americans struggle to make ends meet. When asked by O’Donnell what can be done to steer the U.S. in the right direction these upcoming three years, Trump smiled blithely. “Well, I hope we can have the same year that we had.” 

Let us hope that’s not true. Three more years of this, and it’ll be a long road back for the country we love so much.

The post What Kind of ‘America First’ Is This? appeared first on The American Conservative.