Are you implying that number is for Trump only? If so please cite reference.
My sources are 335 million edit: 335 thousand total since 9/11 per
And the graph on the iraqbodycount page which shows significantly fewer deaths after 2016 than the 4 Obama years before:
https://www.iraqbodycount.org/
I am genuinely interested if there is quantitative evidence of more total civilian deaths under Trump.
@Brainspore is talking about the pandemic. He could also mention the rise in hate crimes since he’s come onto the political scene…
And Trump is very much interested in starting a war with Iran, which would very much kill millions of more civilians. The only reason he has not done so is because the Pentagon has been able to walk that shit back. And do the Kurds not count, because we’ve very much left them open to attack from the Turks and Syrian government.
It’s not an either/or. We can acknowledge and care about ending the war on terror, and not cozy up to a wanna-be dictator who claims to be anti-war, when he just doesn’t like the wars that we’re in. An autocrat is NOT going to be less peaceful, especially against his own people and on immigrants coming into the country. How many people do you think are more vulnerable now, since they’ve not been allowed to come into the country? Do you REALLY think people in refugee camps in the mid east are now safer, in the MIDDLE OF A RAGING PANDEMIC, now that a path to status here has been cut off? How many of those people do you think died as a result?
So, yes, the war on terror has had an horrible and unacknowledged (by many Americans) human toll that we should be talking about. Trump has NOT been more peaceful in ANY real way.
Exactly, plus the side effect of leaving the new administration with the need to increase military spending during a pandemic scenario in which every resource should be aimed at health and economic protection. He is literally attempting to sabotage things in order to have later something to blame Biden for, and blocking any collaboration between his Covid team and Biden’s one (regardless of the lives involved) is a strong hint in that direction.
Did you go to school in Roxbury @VeronicaConnor? The name sounds familiar.
Way off topic BTW.
Right there are a LOT of ways a US President can kill at home and abroad just through inaction.
For example, the United States is uniquely well equipped to send health workers, disaster relief and other basic aid to problem sites around the globe. It is frequently in our own long-term interests to do so because (for example) helping to fight a disease epidemic at its source may prevent it from turning into an unchecked global pandemic.
It’s the kind of thing most Presidents do but that is rarely discussed in the news except when conservatives bring it up to whine about how much money we’re spending in foreign aid.
Right? Just because he’s drawing down troops in wars that many of us oppose doesn’t make him a “more peaceful” president. This reminds me of people who oppose American imperialism (rightly) but excuse Russian imperialism because they oppose American imperialism… BOTH are bad! 
Trump breaking the Obama nuclear deal with Iran is undeniably the worst US foreign policy decision since Bush’s invasion of Iraq back in 2003.
It’s especially frustrating, since the existing deal was a genuine US foreign policy win, and it’s blatantly obvious that Trump’s primary (possibly only) reason for breaking it was that he couldn’t allow Obama to have such a major success as part of his legacy.
I honestly don’t know how well the Iran deal was working out. I also don’t know why it was dependent on America. If a non-nuclear Iran is vital, then why didn’t Europe and even China just pick up the slack and create a new deal with the same terms.
Anyway - current lack of a deal and threats is obviously not working. I honestly think if there is a strike it will be something surgical from Israel, but I could be wrong. I don’t think a military strike would help things.
It is ironic how he was just deriding John Bolton again the other day as “just wanting to bomb everyone”, and now this.
There is no right or wrong with him. There is only right now.
One of the main reason Iran wants nuclear weapons is so the United States doesn’t bomb the shit out of them, just as Trump contemplated this very week. So any deal that didn’t involve the United States as a central partner wouldn’t make any sense for the Iranians to accept.
Not just the US, but the Israelis and now more increasingly the Saudis. They know if the US is in on a deal with the Iranians, then it’s going to give them breathing room with regards to our allies in the region.
True. Trump did not stop that, though. We have the full numbers under both the Bush and Obama administrations, as they are over now. We still have a few months of hell to wade through until the end of the Trump era. And according to the Intercept, not known for being soft on the violence of the Obama era, civilian casualties have not gone down, and in fact have gone up:
So he’s a bad president literally all around, in every single conceivable way.
The site that you linked to says this about how they calculate the death toll from the War on Terror:
The Costs of War reports document the direct and indirect toll that war takes on civilians and their livelihoods, including the lingering effects of war death and injury on survivors and their families.
OK, that’s all fine and good. But if you’re counting people who weren’t killed as a direct result of American military intervention under previous Presidents then we also need to count people who died as an indirect result of Trump’s actions and inaction at home and abroad.
Coronavirus is just one metric by which Trump’s policies came with a horrifying body count around the world.
If that is the epitaph that adorns his headstone it will still be far too kind.
Indeed. He really will go down as the worst president we’ve had. I only hope it puts an end to people believing that we need a businessman to run the government, because no.
My overall point is that Trump has not been a less violent president than any other. His goal was not to end wars, so much as it was to seem to do so in order to privatize those wars through Erik Prince taking over. If you think it’s been bad under the US military, it will be a hell of a lot worse under a privatized military with no accountability. He has also set back any chance of a mid east peace deal by decades, despite his BS “peace” deals between the Israelis and various Gulf states, which are really just arms sales in disguise for formalizing what was already happening in the back channels. Drawing down troops and those deals were merely a distracting for approving the apartheid in Israel, more belligerent attitude towards Iran, turning on the Kurds, and allowing the Taliban to waltz back in to power in Afghanistan, etc, etc, etc.
The overall goal of his administration was certainly more “isolationists” (or rather to funnel as much through proxies and private corporate interests as possible, making holding anyone accountable for war crimes completely and utterly off the table), but only in the service of building up white supremacy at home.
Agreed.
The massive arms sale to the UAE is a great example. That’s not passive, it’s just punting the killing to a third party.
I suppose… except Iran can’t reach the US with their rockets at this point, IIRC. They can definitely reach Israel, and IIRC parts of Europe. So Iran having nuclear power poses more of a threat to those countries. America could attack if they no longer cared about or will willing to risk their allies. Which, again, means if I were those countries I’d be trying to work a deal, but, you know, easier said than done. Maybe there was an attempt, I am just not aware of it.
The ability to nuke a US ally is still a pretty big deterrent in terms of the US attacking Iran.
Not to Trump it isn’t. He couldn’t care a rats ass about our allies. He’s been pissing on all our allies for 4 years.
