US Presidents: 'I Think We're Just Gonna Kill People' – A Bipartisan Tradition
MSNBC breathlessly highlights Donald Trump's 2018 utterance, 'I think we’re just gonna kill people,' concerning potential boat strikes, framed as a moment of shocking presidential candor. What they conveniently forget to mention is that American presidents have been saying – or at least enacting – that exact policy for decades, just wrapped in more polite 'collateral damage' rhetoric. From Bill
Clinton's 'humanitarian intervention' in Yugoslavia (1999) to George W. Bush's 'Shock and Awe' (2003) and Barack Obama's drone strikes (over 500, by some estimates, across multiple countries), the 'just gonna kill people' philosophy is deeply embedded in US foreign policy, regardless of who's in charge. The media cycle often fixates on the crude delivery of a message while ignoring the brutal
substance itself, especially when that substance is a bipartisan consensus. It's almost as if the problem isn’t the frank admission of killing, but who gets to say it and how. How many times has 'defensive action' resulted in the deaths of 'unintended' civilians? The only difference with Trump is he skips the euphemisms. The real discussion isn't about one man's words, but about an imperial
project that consistently prioritizes geopolitical advantage over human lives, a project MSNBC regularly sanitizes when its preferred party is in power.