Political Chameleons

 I am fascinated by these right-wing influencers who seem to have suddenly discovered that war crimes are bad. I am happy for them, don't get me wrong. I'm glad that when Trump threatened to annihilate Iranian "civilization," many of these MAGA pundits suddenly discovered that threatening genocide or mass murder against a civilian population is a moral wrong. 

But—this was hardly the first time Trump demonstrated a sociopathic disregard for human life—and on all the previous occasions, these same MAGA die-hards were cheering him on. 

Months before his Iran war, after all, Trump was already blowing up civilian boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific—a campaign of extrajudicial murder that has so far taken the lives of 181 people without charge or trial. 

It's exactly the same crime against humanity—the extrajudicial killing of defenseless civilians on unsubstantiated allegations of drug crimes—for which Rodrigo Duterte is right now facing prosecution in The Hague. 

But I never heard any of these MAGA warriors utter a single word against these murders. Indeed, some of the same people now criticizing Trump (rightly) for war crimes in Iran were also viciously, crudely, animatedly defending his extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean just a few months earlier. 

For example: here was Megyn Kelly on Trump's threat to destroy "a whole civilization" in Iran: "His negotiation tactic is to kill an entire country full of civilians, men, women and children — an American president — so that the Strait of Hormuz will be opened. It’s just wrong."

Great, good for her, I agree with her so far. 

And yet, here she was in December 2025, commenting on Trump's targeted killings of civilians on fishing boats in the Caribbean: "[W]hether they’re on the boat or in the water, [...] I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so that they lose a limb and bleed out a little."

She didn't seem too worried about war crimes then!

I don't know how exactly to account for this sudden shift in the party line. Maybe it's because Israel is involved in the Iran war, and some of these MAGA pundits are single-issue antisemites for whom opposition to any Jewish state has triumphed briefly over their general love of war crimes and human rights violations. 

Maybe the word came down from Moscow that Putin's pals in the U.S. were no longer to support Trump (j.k.... sort of)? Maybe the spigot of dark money got turned off for pro-Trump content and started flowing for its opposite?

Or maybe it's just that Trump has become so genuinely, woefully unpopular with the public that right-wing influencers can't ignore the fact without seeming irrelevant and out of touch. 

Whatever the reason—it seems highly unlikely (given the propagandists we're dealing with here and the grifts they've been willing to sign on to in the past) that it has anything to do with principle. 

It could also just be that the play here is to set up J.D. Vance as the MAGA "savior" candidate in 2028, since even Trump's weirdest backers know he cannot claim a third term in office. 

People in the MAGA orbit are already trying to spin the narrative that Vance privately opposes the Iran war—a version of events that got a boost from a recent New York Times article that portrayed him advising Trump behind the scenes not to get involved in another Middle East war. 

But whatever he may have said privately, Vance has publicly supported the Iran war. He also loudly, vehemently, and crudely defended Trump's extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean—while mocking the victims. "I wouldn't go fishing right now in that part of the world" was his oh-so-tasteful "joke" about these murders to a baying pro-Trump crowd last year. 

Even Marjorie Taylor Greene—who seems to want to position Vance as the good guy, and who has called on him publicly to join her in abandoning Trump—has noticed the hypocrisy here. 

"No more foreign wars" was the Trump campaign promise, as she understood it. Trump "promised it," she said in an interview with Megyn Kelly last month. "J.D. Vance promised it. Tulsi Gabbard promised it, all of them promised it. And we’re a year in, a year in, and we’re in another f‑‑‑ing war, and we’ve got American troops being killed."

"He had sung against all battles, and again / In their high praise and glory" as Byron once wrote of Southey, that great historical exemplar of intellectual hypocrites and turn-coats (whose early poems like "Wat Tyler" condemned war, embraced pacifism, and praised radical reformers, but whose later work extolled British monarchy and imperialism). 

But should we be surprised? Vance's entire political career up to this point has been defined by precisely such hypocritical pivots. 

MTG has noticed how odd it is that Vance penned an op-ed in 2023 entitled "Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars"—but now here he is publicly backing a whole slew of wars that Trump started—how odd it is that he has gone so quickly from singing "against battles" to praising them, just as Byron described. 

But shortly before that, Vance had likewise flip-flopped on Trump himself. At the time of the first Trump election, he had famously called the president he now serves a "demagogue" and privately warned that he might be "America's Hitler." He had described himself publicly as a "Never Trump guy." 

And look at him now. 

So why should anyone be in the least surprised that Vance would once again go back on his word? That is what he does. This is what he's best at. He "turned his coat — and would have turned his skin," as Byron wrote of Southey. He is a political chameleon who has never let principle get in the way of  ambition—so why should he now? 

In short, here is yet another case in which the MAGA influencers now turning on Trump seem to start the narrative in an odd place. They notice that Vance is a hypocrite and betrayer now on the issue of war—but they don't seem to realize that his whole career in political office began with a similar act of intellectual and moral apostasy. 

Likewise, they seem to have noticed that Trump's current war crimes in Iran are bad—but they strangely ignored all the abundant war crimes and human rights violations he committed before this. 

Of course, many of them will still say—"but Iran is genuinely different. Those children killed at that school were actually innocent civilians. Whereas those boats in the Caribbean are carrying fentanyl, which kills Americans!"

There is no evidence that any of these boats were carrying fentanyl. If they are transporting anything at all through that corridor (and we have nothing but the government's say-so to think that's the case), it is most likely cocaine. 

I have no doubt that some of our neo-fascist tech executive creeps who publicly defend the administration's war crimes and extrajudicial killings—and profit from them directly through defense contracts—have snorted a line or two of the stuff themselves in the past. 

I hope they enjoyed it. A Trinidadian fisherman died to bring them that white powder. 

And plenty of other people annihilated and burned to death in these drone strikes—without a chance to surrender or submit to inspection—probably had nothing to do with the drug trade at all. Probably they were hitching a ride across the sea to Trinidad. Some, possibly, were migrants or asylum-seekers. Others were just fishermen trying to make a living. 

If Megyn Kelly or whoever else still wants to scoff at that, I say—how confident would you be in setting foot in a sailing vessel in the Caribbean right now? How certain are you that the U.S. government never makes a mistake that you would entrust your life or your children's lives to the assumption that these drones strikes are all based on sound, unimpeachable intelligence? 

How lightly would you weigh the risks of a false positive if it were your own loved one whose life was at stake on the waves? "Hold them cheap/ May who ne'er hung there!" to borrow a line from Hopkins. 

No, something tells me these same pundits wouldn't put out to sea right now in the Caribbean. As our Vice President himself said—in that rancid "joke" of his: "I wouldn't go fishing right now in that part of the world."

That was our "antiwar" vice president speaking, the "savior" of "true America First." Remember that, folks, in 2028. That's who he is.  

This is a man without scruples, without principles, without honor or integrity, and we should never for an instant think otherwise. 

When he first decided to back Trump, Vance "turned his coat — and would have turned his skin." And he turned it again in backing Trump's foreign wars. And he will certainly turn it further still—as many times as he feels he needs to in order to vault his way into power.