Two hours before President Donald Trump announced the U.S. missile strike on Syria from Mar-a-Lago on Thursday evening, his old friend Roger Stone was just about a mile away at the Palm Beach Book Store, signing copies of his new book on the Trump campaign.
It wasn’t certain what Trump was about to do in Syria.
“I’m a Trump supporter, and friend, and one of the things that I think helped him gain votes was the idea that we should not endlessly get involved militarily in the Middle East.”
“I think the president would make a mistake to go in,” Stone told LifeZette, putting down his pen.
“I would hope he would recognize that the country does not want — his voters particularly do not want — more foreign wars in which our inherent national interests are just not there,” he continued.
On the radio the next day, Stone — who worked as Trump’s top adviser on the campaign until August 2015, and then tirelessly from the outside, battling on several fronts to help him win the nomination, and election — went off.
“If this becomes a full-fledged invasion of Syria … then we have lost, then we have lost the purposes of electing Donald Trump,” he said during a call-in to InfoWars on Friday. “We did not vote for him so we could have a neocon, interventionist foreign policy.”
Stone said he blames the generals and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, for pushing the president to abandon the non-interventionist position he’d stuck to in the campaign.
“The people, if they wanted a neocon, they would have elected Jeb,” he told host Alex Jones.
The disillusionment with the Syrian strike encapsulated by Stone was widespread among many of Trump’s most loyal populist-conservative supporters.
On Monday, radio talk show host Michael Savage let loose:
“Have you read the latest news, or are you still sitting there like a fool, thinking he’s playing chess?” Savage railed, pointing to news stories reporting that 150,000 Chinese troops are amassing near the border with North Korea as of Monday afternoon.
“It was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen in my life,” Savage said of the strike on Syria, saying he thinks the president is “surrounded by stupid people.”
“Why didn’t he target ISIS instead of Assad?” Savage asked, “Why didn’t he launch them [Tomahawk missiles] against ISIS training camps instead of at the No. 1 enemy of ISIS — Assad?”
Across the pond, Nigel Farage, the Brexit champion and close ideological ally of Trump, said on Friday that he was “confused” and “worried” by the U.S. strike.
“I’m a Trump supporter, and friend, and one of the things that I think helped him gain votes was the idea that we should not endlessly get involved militarily in the Middle East without fully thinking through the implications of what we’re doing,” Farage said on LBC radio in the U.K.
“I think back to Libya a few years ago and arguably we made the world worse as a result of our intervention. So I have to say, I woke up to this news this morning very, very surprised.”
Another ideological ally — conservative columnist Ann Coulter, author of In Trump We Trust: E. Pluribus Awesome! — said on Friday on The Mark Simone Show: “I think I’ll have to change the name to In Trump-ism We Trust.”
“The magnitude of this Syrian meddling, the magnitude of this catastrophe cannot be underestimated,” she said. “I’ve had a knot in my stomach since he’s been filling up his administration with these war-mongers and Wall Street types. You know, if we wanted meddling in the Middle East, there were other candidates to vote for. Trump was very clear and he was very right. And that’s why Trump-ism will live on whether or not he believes it anymore.”
On Monday, Coulter questioned on Twitter why White House press secretary Sean Spicer is pointing to Russia’s unsavory friends — Iran, Syria and North Korea — when the U.S. is lining up with ISIS and al-Qaida by backing the Syrian rebels in their war to topple Assad.
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LifeZette Editor-in-Chief Laura Ingraham posted a news clip to Twitter on Sunday with a circled passage from a New York Times story quoting a China expert saying the Chinese are “thrilled” with the strike because if the U.S. gets bogged down in Syria, Trump can’t make America great again.
“Hope @realDonaldTrump reads this buried in @nytimes,” she wrote.
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