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Trump's New Facebook Ads Claim He's Peacenik Who Also Loves Assassinations

New Facebook ad run by the Trump campaign (left) and President Donald Trump speaking in Ohio on August 6, 2020.
New Facebook ad run by the Trump campaign (left) and President Donald Trump speaking in Ohio on August 6, 2020.
Image: Facebook Ad Library/Getty Images (Getty Images)

Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is running new Facebook ads that insist the president is an advocate for peace and will stop America’s so-called “forever wars.” Oddly enough, the ads also acknowledge that Trump dabbles in political assassinations. In fact, those assassinations are central to Trump’s idea of “peace,” and in many ways, Trump’s entire foreign policy stance seems to be a 21st century version of President Eisenhower’s covert actions in Iran, Cuba, and Guatemala.

The new Facebook ads, which feature phrases like “Make Peace Not War” and “Support Peace” in cheesy 1960s fonts, are quite jarring when you remember that Trump often brags about increasing the size of the U.S. military and has advocated for killing the families of suspected terrorists, among plenty of other war crimes.

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The aesthetic of Trump’s new ad campaign appears to be that of a 10-year-old kid trying to do a school art project about the 1960s.

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Image for article titled Trump's New Facebook Ads Claim He's Peacenik Who Also Loves Assassinations
Image: Donald Trump re-election campaign/Facebook Ad Library
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The new Facebook ads are running most prominently in Texas and Florida, according to data from the Facebook Ad Library, which archives political advertising on the platform to increase election transparency.

At least three versions of the ad have run so far, with one of the ads reading:

Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, his administration has taken out two of the world’s top terrorist leaders, successfully decimated ISIS, and has been committed to getting the United States OUT of Endless Wars.

President Trump will NEVER stop fighting to restore peace around the world, and now he needs to know he has your support!

Sign NOW to show your support for the end of ENDLESS WARS!

Trump is far from a peacenik. In fact, he’s bragged about selling billions in weapons to authoritarian countries like Saudi Arabia (against the wishes of Congress), and assassinated a top Iranian military leader named Qassem Soleimani earlier this year, leading many to wonder if the U.S. was trying to start a war with Iran. Just yesterday, we learned that Elliott Abrams will be overseeing the Trump regime’s policies in Iran. Abrams is perhaps best known as the guy who was convicted of lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra Affair during the Reagan administration.

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Trump has also expanded the U.S. drone program overseas under the CIA and repealed an Obama-era rule mandating reports of civilian casualties from drones. President Obama often got criticism from lefties in the U.S. for his expansive drone program, but Trump has only made those efforts much more deadly and even less transparent.

In April of 2017, Trump even deployed the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal, known as the mother of all bombs (MOAB), killing at least 94 people. The Trump regime said the casualties were all ISIS fighters, but the reason that such a bomb had never been used before was precisely because of the risk of civilian deaths—something that’s still unclear, given how completely decimated the target was. Hamid Karzai, the former president of Afghanistan who was installed by the U.S., denounced America’s use of the weapon calling it an “inhuman act” against a sovereign country.

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“A bomb of that magnitude has consequences for the environment, for our lives, for our plants, for our water, for our soil—this is poison,” Karzai told Al Jazeera at the time.

In some ways, Trump’s “peace through assassination and overwhelming force” is an appeal to nostalgia, whether his advisors know it or not. Dwight Eisenhower’s foreign policy was very similar to Trump’s when he was president in the 1950s, based on declassified documents we’ve only learned about in recent decades.

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Eisenhower embraced covert action, helping overthrow democratically elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, and attempting to do the same in Cuba. But Eisenhower also told the American public to be wary of the “military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower believed that an enormous standing Army would always find reasons to exert itself, especially when military contractors could make a lot of money, but he was the architect of several shady actions all around the world at the start of the first Cold War.

If Eisenhower had tools like social media he might have used advertising campaigns with similar contradictions to the current commander-in-chief, but Eisenhower was admittedly far more normal and even-tempered than Trump. The same can probably said about any president of the modern era though. There’s nothing normal about the Trump era.

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Over the past year, Trump’s Facebook ads have used Nazi symbols, contained racial slurs, and deployed old out-of-context photos to depict American riots. But the Trump campaign’s latest Facebook ad campaign might be its most audacious yet because it wants Americans to believe Trump is truly the president of peace.

Make America Great Again, through assassinations and secret drones. At least that seems to be the message. Unless Elliott Abrams tries to give American voters the worst October Surprise in history by spearheading Trump’s long-fantasized invasion of Iran.