This is the cover of Dublin’s ‘Village‘ magazine’s February issue. The question is as follows: is this just a cheap way to garner publicity, an incitement to murder or merely putting into words, or rather words and an edited photo, what many others around the world are thinking or even hoping? To judge by my own interactions and conversations since November 9th, 2016, I’d put money on the third option. (full disclosure: I have written for the Village from time to time)
The Broken Elbow 
Every POTUS since 1945 has arrogated to themselves the right to order the killings of civilians for political purposes – all of them. Assertion of the right to control life and death is part and parcel of claiming higher species status for imperial peoples, after all, as the British used to do.
POTUSes have pretended they weren’t doing it, pretended it was someone else’s fault or simply said the killings were justified, but lately they have just asserted that they have the right to kill anyone they claim threatens an obscure, hazy ‘national security’ – Obama’s drone and air strikes that routinely killed innocent civilians are a case in point.
No statesman who orders, permits or condones this kind of killing has any right to expect better treatment for themselves, having first used the power of the state to kill others. This is especially the case where a state with virtually unlimited access to technologies of violence that no other state can hope to match, like the USA, uses that violence on the weakest and most defenceless, as in the case of massive civilian casualties in the invasion of Iraq.
So the question is,why pick on Trump? Compared to W and Obama, he’s a mere amateur! Foul, unpleasant, paranoid, etc.etc. but, at least on first evidence (something which may change), he recognizes the awful atrocities that US wars abroad have been. And after all, if it’s OK to allow a traitor to his country like Tony Blair to walk around with no trial, no punishment, the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis soaked into his every pore, again, why pick on Trump?