When Republicans started calling our Defense Department the “Department of War” it probably should have been a dead giveaway for what was most assuredly coming next.
When the most bloodthirsty and immoral president in American history, Donald Trump, appointed a high-octane oil slick like Pete Hegseth to lead that shell-shocked department, it should have been dreadfully obvious that human beings, not soaring prices, would be under steady attack as long as this violent regime could hold onto power.
Just 14 months into his vile second term, consumer prices are rising quickly across the board, and we are at war seemingly everywhere because it turns out Trump is the most Republican president in my long lifetime. Trump, unlike his phony predecessors in the GOP like the Bushes, isn’t even pretending he gives a damn about the myriad issues that affect Americans’ daily lives, or even life itself for that matter.
Trump knows what his voters really like, and is delivering it to them wrapped cold in body bags.
When he said with a shrug last week after the first three troops were killed in his sinful Iran War, “There will likely be more [deaths] before it ends. That’s the way it is,” he was telling us just how little he values their lives.
Because that is how it really is with Republicans, and has been my entire life.
In Trump’s world there are the billionaire elites, who prop him up and fill both his bottomless pockets and unquenchable malignant narcissism to overflowing, and there are the expendable “suckers and losers” he abuses like so many of the women who have crossed his crooked path.
Trump and his Republicans don’t value life, they celebrate violence and death, and the more brutal and bloody it is the better. This really needs to be talked about more, because it is true, and that truth — like so many countless people and places around the globe and certainly right here in America — has taken one helluva beating the past decade ...
The “shock and awe” of the senseless War in Iraq was just a warm-up act for what we are getting right now from a monster who ran on “no new wars” but has now attacked eight different countries, on four different continents to give his electorate what they really want, but would prefer we didn’t talk about.
High prices, inflation, and affordability issues were just a polite front for what really gets their cold hearts beating: death, destruction, and plenty of it.
An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released Friday revealed that 84 percent of Republicans favor this illegal war in Iran, because if they can’t have the lower prices they lied to us they cared about, they will damn sure get the pain and punishment they have proven they crave so much.
The truth is Republicans absolutely love this illegal war in Iran, because they will have the carnage from the racist, America-attacking thug they voted for not once, not twice, but three times.
Can we all finally admit that the cruelty really is the point with Republicans?
For the Republican voter, the 2024 election was never about lowering prices. Oh, sure, that would have been a nice little perk, but Trump’s appeal to the average Republican voter was always his unlimited capacity to say and do the very worst things on their behalf.
Instead of bringing them lower prices, he has brought them blood by the bucketful, via public beatings, and murders that make the hair on the back of their necks stand at attention.
Google “ICE beatings” and you can spend the rest of your day watching masked government agents slamming heads into concrete walls and sidewalks, throwing women into the street, dragging people out of their houses by their hair, and crying children being ripped from their parents’ arms.
These voters didn’t vote for Trump in spite of all those horrible things, they voted for him because of them.
No matter how high prices get, or how bad it gets for the working folk in America, Republicans can always, always, always count on their grotesque president taking their anger out on everybody else.
They concocted stories of brown and black boogeymen eating our dogs and cats so when the time came they could justify dehumanizing them and shooting and beating them to death.
The revolting Kristi Noem wasn’t fired this week because of any of the many heinous acts under her charge — including mass murder — at the out-of-control Department of Homeland Security (DHS). No, she was finally let go, because she gave herself, and not her orange, thin-skinned boss a starring role in an absurd $200 million-plus taxpayer-funded ad campaign.
The insane commercials feature the pie-eyed, flounder-lipped Noem celebrating herself by riding around Mount Rushmore on the back of a poor horse, whose life was in danger the minute she clapped a saddle on his back.
Noem did everything Trump wanted during her revolting tenure at DHS, except get caught, and I promise you that the average Republican voter still absolutely loves her for it.
Noem’s firing was no doubt instructive to Hegseth, who has been given carte blanche to devalue as many human lives as possible, including and mostly the troops under his charge, just as long as Trump gets all the credit for bringing the Republican voters the carnage they love.
It should be inconceivable that such a low form of life would be allowed within 1,000 miles of our armed forces, much less commanding them. Under Hegseth’s crooked charge, our military is no longer being ordered to honorably take the high ground, and are instead being threatened to go just as low as possible.
His very presence atop our Defense Department puts our troops in more and more danger each day, because mark my words, the time is coming when their adversaries will dish out the same terrible punishment to them that they have been ordered by Hegseth to inflict on others.
Most of us who wore the uniform in war and peace, did so because we believed in high ideals. We took an oath to follow the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and march in the footsteps of the thousands of brave souls who came before us, and stormed that beach, or bravely engaged that vaunted enemy carrier group.
War is hell, yes, but it is supposed to be fought with bravery, honor, and under the written laws that guide our military.
What would any of our prisoners of war through the years say about shooting men, who have long since surrendered and are helplessly clinging to the wreckage of a boat, pleading for their lives?
This is the type of thing coming for our troops if God forbid their vessel is ever blown to bits, or their boots ever hit the ground in Iran or elsewhere, because Hegseth and the draft-dodging Trump, have signaled to our enemies that our troops don’t matter much, and there are no longer any rules for engagement.
It is exactly what you would expect from a Commander-in-Chief, who disgraces the graves of our fallen and has never been brave enough to serve anybody but himself.
We are a nation at war with itself, and everybody around us, because that is exactly how the Republican Party likes it.
Violence, war and hate are their hallmarks, and the only things they have consistently delivered to the American public for the past 75 years.
There is nothing new about any of this, except that they’ve finally found a leader who can provide all that with a smile on his face.
D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.