The bipartisan governing elite’s panic over Mr. Trump’s potential for destroying their cozy, elitist, bribe-filled, war-causing, and increasingly authoritarian culture is quite clear in the self-righteous, all-knowing, and citizenry-hating anti-Trump letter published on 8 August 2016. It was signed by 50 Republicans who identify themselves as foreign-policy experts, which in both parties is code for “arrogant and war-loving interventionists.”

The signatories are not really Republican foreign-policy experts. They are rather bipartisan interventionists who are part of the continuum of the post-Soviet foreign-and-defense policy elite that has never, even for a second, considered applying the Founders’ commonsense, non-interventionist, strategically sound, and republic-preserving concept of “America First” to the conduct of the republic’s international affairs. They hate Mr. Trump for suggesting it because it would work and turn them out on the street.

Indeed, until Trump’s candidacy, the bipartisan interventionist elite never gave a damn which party governed because both parties allowed them to seek, cause, and revel in endless, usually unnecessary, and always lost wars; to be more loyal to the security interests of Israel, Arab tyrants, and their own wallets than to U.S. security interests; and to show not a single qualm about getting tens of thousands of America’s soldier-children killed or maimed in interventionist wars that do not need fighting and which they did not intend to win.

They also never gave a damn about what U.S. voters thought about and wanted in the nation’s foreign policy. All they really needed from U.S. citizens was (a) more of their income in taxes to spend profligately — mountains of which they gave to their foreign favorites — and (b) the lives and limbs of their non-Ivy-League-educated, and so expendable, children to waste in unnecessary wars.

Overall, Mr. Trump ought to wear the letter as a badge of honor. He also ought to keep drawing steady attention to the fact that the letter — notwithstanding its unconvincing weasel words to the contrary — fully endorse a Hillary Clinton presidency because she is, after all, one of them, an arrogant, war-loving, Israel-First interventionist.

As you read the letter, consider the following 25 items. They offer a glittering, if often blood-soaked array of the gifts that the bipartisan foreign-policy professionals/experts have given the American people over the past quarter century. You might ask yourself if you want more of such gifts for you, your family, your community, and our now weakening and endangered republic.

The interventionists have given their fellow citizens:

1. The war-causing insanity found in the concept of “American exceptionalism,” which the Founders would have rejected as not only ahistorical, but as evidence of war lust, and arrogance bordering on hubris. Men of humility, the Founders believed Americans were human, no more and no less. They concluded that the only thing exceptional about Americans was the exceptional opportunity afforded them by living in an extraordinarily fertile, resource-and-water rich North America, a continent which also is reliably protected by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and so allows Americans to mind their own business and avoid other peoples’ wars.
2. Advocacy for the unnecessary, unobtainable, interventionist, and war-causing “New World Order” of G.H.W. Bush.
3. An unnecessary war with Islam that will be 20 years old on 11 August 2016, which is now growing into a world war that the United States clearly is losing.
4. The failure to kill Osama bin Laden in 1998-1999 and thereby prevent the current and intensifying war with Islam.
5. A consistent support for Arab tyrannies that has earned Americans eternal hatred among Muslims.
6. The unnecessary 1992 U.S. intervention in Somalia and the consequent U.S. defeat and retreat from that country.
7. Multiple interventionist wars to install freedom and democracy in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Somalia. The wars have not only failed to install democracy in those countries, but have provided the U.S. national government — under both parties — with the immediately grasped and exercised opportunity to increase the executive’s power and use it at home to constrict civil liberties guaranteed Americans by the Constitution.
8. All-out support for the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in July, 2006, from which Ethiopian forces eventually retreated in defeat, but only after giving birth to Al-Shabaab.
9. Refusal to destroy al-Qaeda after the East Africa embassy bombings (1998) and the near-sinking of the USS Cole (2000).
10. Rules of engagement for soldiers and Marines in multiple wars that make them targets, not killers, and prevent U.S. victory.
11. A complete refusal to see the unbreakable ties between foreign and domestic affairs, which is most notable in their willingness to wage frequent, unnecessary, and always lost wars that have helped bankrupt America, divide its society, and make it hated around the world.
12. A consistent war-causing and Islamist-motivating willingness to always put Israel’s interests above genuine U.S. national security interests.
13. A necessary post-9/11 war in Afghanistan that started in October, 2001, and quickly became a democracy crusade which brought zero democracy to Afghanistan and the defeat of the U.S. military and its NATO allies.
14. An unnecessary war in Iraq that began in March, 2003, became a democracy crusade/war that the U.S.-led coalition lost, gave birth to ISIS, and turned the country into an oppressive and Iran-manipulated Shia theocracy.
15. The currently ongoing, unnecessary 2014 re-intervention in the already lost Iraq war.
16. The currently ongoing, unnecessary, and now escalating re-intervention in the already lost war in Afghanistan.
17. With the EU, support for the overthrow of the pro-Russian regime in Ukraine, an action that necessitated Russia’s re-annexation of Crimea and, with that event, restarted the Cold War.
18. The exhaustion, in multiple unnecessary and lost wars, of the U.S. military in human and material terms. And, because of the threat-filled world the bipartisan interventionists have created, the guaranteeing of steep increases in defense spending, funded by either more taxes, more debt, or both, and the near-certain resumption of conscription.
19. Foreign policies in the Muslim world that since 9/11 have yielded U.S. military casualties of c. 6,650 killed and c. 42,000 wounded or maimed in lost wars, and have left the 2,996 people killed and the 6,000-plus wounded in the 9/11 attacks unavenged and now largely forgotten, save for one day a year.
20. No hint of concern about the Veterans Administration’s failures while the bipartisan interventionist signatories were guiding U.S. military and foreign affairs.
21. The shredding of the Fourth Amendment’s protections via NSA’s collection of all U.S. citizens’ electronic communications.
22. An utter failure to insist that U.S. borders be controlled as an indispensable component of national defense, thereby awarding the republic’s foes free entry and safe haven until ordered to attack.
23. Supporting such mad war aims as giving democracy, freedom, liberty, women’s rights, and secularism to foreigners, in essence getting U.S. Marines killed so Mrs. Ibrahim can vote.
24. Treaties — especially the NATO Treaty — that negate America’s sovereignty by removing the republic’s ability to decide for itself when and for what it will go war or abstain therefrom.
25. Unnecessary wars and interventions in the Islamic world that have ensured that the territory of the United States will increasingly become a battlefield, one that may well create conditions that kill the republic and yield a military-backed tyranny in its place.