There's much to say about this, but let me start with this: single issue "drone strikes are bad" voters don't exist, with the possible exception of editorial positions at certain legacy publications. It's a lazy stand-in for people frustrated with endless US violence abroad

Yglesias isn't wrong that the Trump admin scaled back drone war transparency, but that's the middle of the story. The story before is that, really, up until 2015, the Obama admin had hardly made any moves towards transparency, and those were all executive orders, easy to undo

That the Trump admin would scale back voluntary airstrike transparency was immediately clear to anyone following; the post-election November 2016 leak of a Department of Defense manual for lawful targeting was one sign among many https://www.popsci.com/pentagon-targeting-manual-released-online/

What happened after Trump scaled back the transparency, though, is a strange and equally under-covered part of the story: Congress, itself, mandated reporting, in some form, in subsequent NDAAs. That gives transparency more legal weight than Obama-era executive orders.

(That Trump is ignoring transparency mandates on this and every front is part of why the actual congressional action on airstrike transparency feels like a footnote of a story.)

But how this is playing out in US media misses the fundamental point of the comic: Obama built his 2008 campaign on the premise that he would end the disastrous wars. They've continued, for a host of reasons, despite largely being up to executive discretion.

2020 marks the 5th presidential election with the war in theory in question, and the third *reelection* with it in play. That the long wars instead sit as a void of policy, while deployments, strikes, and death continue like they have for 19 years, is worth pointing out.

For the victims of US violence abroad, the last 19 years have been mostly one of continuity, with changes to the policy a matter of barely perceptible degree, if at all. War on Terror as consensus foreign policy means very little changes for people most harmed.

Anyway. I wrote about the continuity between Trump and Obama on drone strikes here, but really the gist is that it will take withdrawal, not transparency, to reduce harm, and that takes executive or congressional action to force. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/22/obama-drones-trump-killings-count/