In a bid to appeal to broad anti-war sentiments in the working class, ex-President Trump has incorporated elements of the political rhetoric of former Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard into his fascistic campaign for president following their recent endorsements of him.

Appearing together in La Crosse, Wisconsin, on Thursday, Gabbard guided Trump through his usual anti-immigrant and right-wing talking points, with an emphasis on anti-communist agitation. Trump began the interview attacking “Comrade Kamala. She’s a Marxist. Her father was a Marxist before her. So she was brought up in the family tradition… this country is not ready for a Marxist, we don’t want a Marxist as a president.”

After an audience member questioned Trump on his plan for combating inflation, Gabbard noted the cost of “everything has gone up. Kamala Harris, this plan that she’s announced, is government price controls, I think it’s important to touch on… what’s going to happen if Kamala Harris institutes price controls?”

This was the cue for another anticommunist rant, as Trump replied, “So that’s a communist plan. It’s never worked. It’s been tried by others, believe it or not, Richard Nixon tried it, a lot of people tried it. It’s been tried many times and it always leads to the same failure. … It’s called control. They want control.”

After a brief anti-scientific rant against climate change, Trump segued into warning about the increasing danger of global nuclear war:

We do have a problem though. It’s climate change, but a different kind of climate change, it’s called nuclear global warming. We can say that. That’s global warming. And if we don’t have a smart president, you know, you have five nations now with pretty massive nuclear power. Some have very massive nuclear power, including us and Russia, China’s behind, way behind, but within four or five years they will catch up and we don’t want them to catch up.

Trump added,

the biggest problem in my opinion … is nuclear weapons. They are a destructive force the likes of which nobody has never seen before and we have to make sure they are never used. We have to make sure it’s not going to happen.

Trump’s claims to be “anti-war” are completely bogus. Throughout his presidency Trump escalated wars in the Middle East, providing virtually unlimited support for the US-backed Saudi and UAE intervention into Yemen and Israeli interventions in Gaza and the West Bank.

As with Biden, in every year of the Trump administration, the Pentagon budget rose. Furthermore, Trump’s withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty precipitated the current nuclear buildup.

Ignoring all of this, Gabbard sought to present Trump as an anti-war candidate. She pointed to a YouGov poll that found “over 60 percent of Americans feel that World War III and nuclear war is going to happen within five to ten years. … I wanted to ask you about this because it’s important to know what kind of leadership you bring, and what you will do to stop this slide to nuclear war and World War III so that we can feel hopeful again.”

Trump replied by repeating a compliment he received from the antisemitic prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, that he could end all the current wars with “a telephone call.”

Trump is attempting to present himself as a president whose mere threats over the phone will terrify enemies into surrender, thus averting war. That such threats would inevitably be acted on, at some point, he does not bother to discuss. He attempts to have it both ways on national-security issues, claiming to be so much stronger than Biden-Harris that no one will dare to challenge the power of the United States.

This avoids discussion of the central problem confronting the American ruling elite: that its long-term economic decline means that its global hegemony can only be enforced through escalating use of military force, no matter the consequences for political stability within the United States or the danger of triggering World War III.

The political trajectory of Gabbard is significant. A US Army combat veteran and psychological operations officer, in 2016 she endorsed Bernie Sanders for president; four years later, in 2020, she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination herself before dropping out and endorsing Biden over Trump.

In 2022, Gabbard left the Democratic Party officially, announcing in a video message that she can’t remain in a party “under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers, who are driven by cowardly wokeness … who demonize the police but protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, who believe in open borders.”

On August 26, Gabbard endorsed Trump, three days after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined Trump on-stage at a Turning Point USA rally in Phoenix, Arizona, to offer his support. Both Kennedy and Gabbard have been outspoken opponents of the US-backed war in Ukraine against Russia, while still remaining firm advocates of US imperialism and military intervention abroad, including the slaughter in Gaza.

While there are tactical divisions in the ruling class over when and how aggressively to deploy lethal assets against their “competitors” in Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and others, the entire political establishment supports the genocide in Gaza as part of a broader regional war.

Speaking to a few thousand supporters in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on Friday, Trump began the rally attacking “Comrade Kamala” and “the fake news back there.” He also touted his endorsements from Gabbard and RFK Jr. “Together we are fighting to secure our borders, end the endless foreign wars and defend the working people of America.”

The aspiring dictator hit his main campaign themes, railing against the “rigged election” and the “fake news,” the latter, more so than usual. “The fake news is doing everything possible, everything they can to help Kamala Harris,” Trump hissed.

Later, he added that he had to “show you how bad the fake news is… a lot of people say don’t hit down on the fake news, don’t mention it, don’t hit down… But I always like to mention it. Because if you don’t mention it, our supporters don’t really know what to believe and they sort of believe this stuff.”

Trump played a montage of clips featuring Harris, since “Kamala and the media don’t want to talk about her radical record.” After Trump played the montage, a man attempted to cross the perimeter into the media pen and go after reporters.

As police and security elements were subduing the man, who was repeatedly tasered, Trump said, “That’s all right. That’s ok. No, he’s on our side. We get a little itchy, David, don’t we? No, no, he’s on our side.”

In an appeal to QAnon and Christian fascist elements, as police continued to arrest the man, whose name has not been released as of this writing, Trump recalled his attempted assassination last month and claimed that American flags at the rally formed an “angel” after the event, signifying God’s protection over Trump.

“You had two American flags very far apart, held up, … and they were waving and as that horrible event was taking place, the wind blew the flags together and they formed a perfect angel.”

Turning back to the man who stormed the media pen, Trump said, “He had the angel, he held up the angel and our people went after him. No, no, he’s on side, he’s on our side. Thank you very much. That’s very nice.”