Senator Jon Ossoff, in a clip circulated by The Bulwark on August 10, delivered a formulation that most of his colleagues would consider impolite to repeat on the Senate floor: “There’s something uniquely despicable about lying a nation into war, treating citizens as fools, and the selfless patriots who serve as pawns.” The statement has accumulated 154,000 views on his Facebook page and nearly 47,000 on YouTube, which by the metrics of our attention economy qualifies as a modest viral event. By the metrics of what the United States Senate typically permits itself to say about a sitting president’s war, it qualifies as something closer to a rupture.
Let us be precise about what Ossoff is describing, because the temptation here is to treat his remarks as campaign rhetoric and move on. They are campaign rhetoric. They are also an accurate summary of a pattern that the literature on democratic war-making has documented for decades. The executive branch possesses structural incentives to manufacture or exaggerate casus belli. Congress possesses structural incentives to defer. The public possesses structural incentives to believe what they are told until the body bags arrive. This is not a Trump problem. It is an institutional architecture problem that Trump happens to be operating with unusual enthusiasm.
What distinguishes this moment is not the lying. Every administration that has wanted a war has lied, or at minimum curated the intelligence with aggressive optimism. What distinguishes it is the combination of lying with what can only be called executive absenteeism. Ossoff, in a separate post, noted that the sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln have now been at sea for 240-plus days without a port call, a Navy record. While they circle the waters of a conflict zone, the president of the United States, by Ossoff’s account, sleeps through his meetings, golfs, trades stocks, and entertains fantasies about building a ballroom. The Tennessee Holler’s amplification of the quote added the detail about Trump wanting to fly with someone named Natalie on what was described as a “defenseless flying palace,” which I will leave to others to parse for its symbolic resonance.
The historical analogy that presents itself is not Iraq, though Iraq is the obvious one. It is the broader pattern of imperial executive function during periods of military overextension, where the decision-making class becomes increasingly decoupled from the consequences of its decisions. The sailors on the Lincoln are not decoupled. They are 240 days into a deployment that was supposed to end months ago, serving with what Ossoff correctly calls excellence, while the man who extended their mission cannot be bothered to remain conscious during his briefings.
江戸村のとくぞう (BY-SA) via wikimediaOne could argue, and serious people have, that Ossoff is simply doing what opposition senators do during wartime elections. He is also running what appears to be a Senate re-election campaign against Representative Mike Collins, whom he has tied to the war, to tariffs, to Medicaid cuts, and to documented links with white nationalist figures. The Atlanta rally on August 16 will presumably feature more of this. None of it is politically disinterested.
But the fact that a statement is politically motivated does not make it false, and the reflex to treat all wartime criticism as electioneering is itself one of the mechanisms by which executive war-making escapes accountability. Ossoff is naming a specific moral category: the leader who manufactures a war and then cannot be bothered to pay attention to its conduct. That category has a long pedigree. It does not usually end well for the nation in question, and the academic literature on this point is, I am afraid, rather settled.