Trump has no respect for our fallen service members
Just before the President of the United States was scheduled to attend a 4 p.m. policy meeting this afternoon, he posted on his official Truth Social account something that, not long ago, all of us, Republicans and Democrats alike, would have agreed no American president should post, let alone think.
In it, he compared military deaths across America’s wars, ending with, “Iran Military Conflict: 4 months, 18 DEAD.” He presented it as evidence of his success, and a win for the American people because the number was lower than in previous wars. Hours later, at 9:28 p.m., he doubled down, posting a new graph comparing those same wars, again highlighting the lower death toll and declaring, “These are the real facts.” before demanding “REPORT THEM!”
The graph itself gives us a deep look into his mind and how it works. He divided it into two columns: “Other Presidents” and “Trump.” Red bars for their wars, blue bars for his. He formatted the deaths of more than one hundred thousand Americans across decades of conflict into a basic infographic, placing his name on the winning side. He used those fallen Americans as props for his argument and proof that his wars are better than everyone else’s because so far, fewer people have died.
In both posts, he was also careful with the labels he used. Iran was identified as a “ Military Conflict.” Not a war. After 4 months of bombing, eighteen dead Americans, untold numbers of injuries, Iranian civilian casualties, and instability around the world, he will not call it what it really is: a war. Because calling it that triggers congressional authorization requirements, and a level of public accountability he does not want to meet. But Venezuela, where the death toll was zero and the optics served him well, he labeled the “Venezuela War.”
This is part of the pattern that has been building for months. CNN published an analysis noting that when U.S. troops die, Trump reaches immediately for politics, calling it “a real blind spot.” But it is much more than a blind spot. It is a window into how he sees his fellow Americans. After two service members were killed in Jordan on Friday, Trump spent the weekend golfing at Bedminster and attending the World Cup final. When NewsNation correspondent Hannah Brandt called him directly because he had not yet issued a public statement, he said: “It’s a very sad thing. We hate to see it happen. It’s in service to our country... we’re never, they’re never going to allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” After the first three American deaths were reported in March, he told NBC News: “We have three, but we expect casualties. But in the end, it’s going to be a great deal for the world.” Sixty-eight percent of Americans now say this war is not worth fighting. Those are worse polling numbers than Iraq or Afghanistan ever had.
That wasn’t the only thing Trump posted today. He shared much of the same complaints and demands he has become known for. But the one he shared earlier this morning, at 8:22 and re-shared again at 8:27 a.m., also received a lot of pushback. In it, Trump declared that rich people and companies are “pouring out of Dumocrat run Blue States” and that if the trend continues, those states will become the “Ghettos of the Future.”
The word “ghetto” carries a lot of weight. The walled Jewish quarters in Nazi occupied teritories, where those locked inside were forced to survive by eating shoes until they died of starvation, disease, or after transfer to concentration camps, were called ghettos. Then there are the more recent “ghettos” where Black, brown, and immigrant communities across American cities have settled after generations of segregation, redlining, exclusion, and deliberate economic assault; the word has never been neutral. For a sitting president to use it as an insult and threat against entire states is reckless and a direct call for further fear and division.
The claim itself is another one of the Trump Administration’s lies. California’s GDP reached 4.3 trillion dollars in 2025, making it the fourth-largest economy on the planet, behind only the United States as a whole, China, and Germany. New York and California are the two largest net contributors to the federal government, collectively sending back billions of dollars more than they receive. Between 2018 and 2022, blue states contributed approximately sixty percent of all federal tax revenue while receiving only about fifty-three percent of federal spending directed to states. States with Democratic governors pay an average of ten billion dollars more in federal taxes than they get back. States with Republican governors receive an average of four billion dollars more in federal benefits than they contribute. The states he is calling ghettos are the ones funding the states he praises. The “Dumocrat” states are carrying the country on their backs.
The entire Republican Party has abandoned the very principles they once claimed to stand for. They have replaced them with Trump-style performances. We saw it today when House Majority Leader Steve Scalise went on CNBC to defend the SAVE America Act, Trump’s voter suppression bill, and said in all seriousness: “For God’s sake, you can’t go get pasta at Olive Garden without a picture ID.” And yesterday, Rep. Virginia Foxx said the same thing on the House floor: “Heck, you even need to present a photo ID to utilize the Olive Garden’s never-ending pasta pass.”
This is what the United States Congress is spending its time doing. Comparing the constitutional right to vote to a chain restaurant’s promotion for unlimited pasta, salad, or soup and breadsticks. If this weren’t such a dangerous time for the continuation of our government, we might laugh at what they are doing, but taken in the context of how serious this issue is, it is not funny; it is disappointing.
Like most days, Trump gave me more than I could possibly talk about in one post, because there are no guardrails left to stop him from saying and doing whatever pops into his mind. And that is dangerous not just for the country, but also for the world. But the story I keep coming back to is one that received some attention but faded quickly into the background noise. Because this isn’t just about corruption in the moment; it is something that will shape the future of our country as long as Trump is the president. On July 16, we learned that Trump Media and Technology Group would be offering a new paid service that will give Wall Street trading firms millisecond-early access to posts from the highest-ranking Truth Social accounts, including the president’s, before the general public sees them. It launches next month, and the company says it has already secured paying customers.
This is deeply concerning. The president of the United States often posts about wars, tariffs, sanctions, and military strikes on Truth Social, along with so many other topics that move markets every which way. His posts make oil prices drop, and defense stocks soar. Billions of dollars respond instantly to his words. And now his own company, in which he remains the largest shareholder, is selling early access to those announcements so that paying clients could potentially trade on presidential decisions before the rest of the world even reads them.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse formally asked the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to investigate after oil futures trading surged dramatically in the minutes before Trump’s Iran-related posts on multiple occasions. On March 23, billions of dollars in oil and stock-market futures changed hands just sixteen minutes before Trump posted that the United States would postpone strikes against Iranian energy infrastructure. Someone who shorted one million dollars in oil futures during that sixteen-minute window could have netted nearly $170,000 in profit. On April 7, approximately $950 million in bets on falling oil prices appeared hours before Trump announced a ceasefire, which sent prices plunging roughly 15 percent.
People were already suspected of trading on advance knowledge of his posts. Now the President of the United States of America’s company is offering it as a product. It is designed for the wealthiest firms in the country, the ones who already have every advantage, creating yet another divide between those with access to power and money and those who don’t.
When you stop and look at everything Donald Trump is doing from the outside, the big picture is that there’s nobody left in this government who cares what the United States used to stand for. Nobody to tell him no. No one to remind him what the office of the presidency is supposed to be. No one to stop him from acting out his worst impulses. No one to fight for our country or the American people. Because of that, there are no limits to what Donald Trump will do next.
Today, historian Timothy Snyder, the author of On Tyranny and one of the most respected scholars of authoritarianism alive, posted this: “Trump is pursuing this war in the hope that Iran carries out an act of terror in the US. And even if it doesn’t, which I doubt it will, consider the possibility that Trump’s people would fake one.”
His words reminded me of the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament building, burned on February 27, 1933. Shortly after, Hitler used it to justify the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended civil liberties, eliminated freedom of the press and the right to assembly, and gave the government authority to detain citizens without trial. Whether the Nazis set the fire themselves or simply exploited it has been debated for decades, but the outcome was the same either way. It was the mechanism for emergency powers that became permanent. Donald Trump and his enablers carrying out their own Reichstag moment is something I have feared since he was re-elected, and it feels as though we are moving closer to that possibility the closer we get to the midterm elections.
That is the warning Snyder was sounding. The infrastructure is already built in this country for this to happen. Donald Trump’s personal military force, ICE, already operates with extraordinary powers and billions in federal funding. The judicial branch is holding the line in many lower courts, but the highest court has been overtaken by Trump loyalists. What used to be considered independent agencies have been stripped bare or had their leadership replaced by Trump sycophants. And our elections are already being undermined by the firing of members of the Election Assistance Commission, and they face an even greater threat if Donald Trump succeeds in pushing the SAVE Act through Congress. The only thing Donald Trump still needs is a moment he can manipulate.
So what do we do? We start by not letting the absurdity of comparing unlimited pasta access to being able to vote distract us from the fact that we are watching our democratic norms be hollowed out from the inside. We do not let the sheer volume of daily outrages numb us into treating any of this as normal. It is not normal. And every time we remind ourselves of that, we make it harder for them to pretend otherwise.
We protect the midterms. The SAVE Act is designed to suppress the votes of eligible Americans before November. We must make sure every eligible voter we know has their documentation in order. We double-check our own registrations, and we help others check theirs, so that we are ready for whatever this administration throws at us next.
We support each other. You have all been beyond supportive of my work. Your paid memberships are the reason I’m able to keep every single post free, with no paywall, so that anyone who needs this can find it. I’m so grateful for that support. And tonight, I’d like to ask you to go beyond supporting me and my work.
Please consider supporting those who are going to bear the greatest cost of everything this administration does next, the men and women serving in our military and the families who love them. Trump won’t even call this a war. He calls it a “conflict.” But the families of the eighteen Americans who are never coming home know exactly what it is, and what it should be called, a war. As he escalates his forever war, with no congressional authorization behind it, no clear objective beyond nuclear weapons that were not an imminent threat to start with, those families and the ones waiting for their loved ones to come home safely are carrying the heaviest of weights.
So please, look for ways to support them. Join efforts in your community to aid military families. Donate time and money to organizations like Blue Star Families, Operation Homefront, and the USO, all of which provide direct assistance to military families. Write to deployed service members through organizations like Letters to Soldiers and A Million Thanks. Look for military family appreciation events in your community, and celebrate with them.
Trump turned their sacrifice and those who are coming home in caskets into a victory lap. We can be the ones who actually honor them in the ways that count. And we can remind them that even when their commander-in-chief treats their lives as a number on a chart, the rest of this country sees them as heroes who deserve so much better than what they are getting from this president.
As dark as today was, we’re starting to see more glimmers of light breaking through. Just hours ago, a federal judge in Miami ruled that the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust must surrender detailed financial records to the BBC as part of Trump’s own ten billion dollar defamation lawsuit over their January 6 documentary. He filed this suit to bully the BBC into silence. He claimed the documentary destroyed his brand, his properties, and his businesses. And today, the court told Trump to open his books and prove it. The judge noted that Trump’s legal team had produced only 735 pages of documents, described by the BBC’s lawyers as a “sham production” of news articles pulled from the internet, while the BBC had turned over 87,000 pages. The judge also denied Trump’s attempt to block dozens of subpoenas sent to members of his inner circle. He tried to weaponize the courts against the First Amendment and the free press, and the courts turned it around on him. His own lawsuit is now being used to force his financial records into the light.
We need to remember that as much as Trump thinks he is impermeable, the courts are still holding him accountable. This was a blow to him, but it is a signal to the rest of us that he is not untouchable. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
PS. You can make a significant difference right now by subscribing to my Substack. Your support helps me cover more ground and keep telling the truth about the lies and destruction unfolding in this country.
This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Picture of the day: It is so warm in San Diego that puppies are melting out of their beds.
Sources:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/21/world/live-news/iran-war-trump
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/20/politics/iran-war-unpopularity-iraq-vietnam
https://time.com/7222411/blue-states-are-bailing-out-red-states/
https://www.alternet.org/trump-bbc-lawsuit-financial-records/
https://www.stripes.com/theaters/middle_east/2026-07-18/iran-attack-2-americans-kia-22299945.html
Thank you Heather.
Today the Secretary of Defense (War) Pete Hegseth, General Dan Caine (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins went to Capital Hill asking Congress, the Appropriations Committee, for a $67 billion to $88 billion emergency supplemental funding injection to address “shortfalls” from the ongoing war in Iran, (that nobody wants) alongside a historic $1.5 trillion defense budget for the 2027 fiscal year.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins did not mention the service members who died in Iran during her testimony at today’s Senate Appropriations Committee hearing. Her participation was focused strictly on an entirely different aspect of the administration's multi-part budget package. Rollins focused her remarks and answers on agricultural relief and domestic farmer support.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine explicitly honored and named several of the U.S. service members who recently died in his opening remarks during the Senate Appropriations Committee hearing. Gen. Caine stated, "Today, we remember 1st Lt. Tyler Feehan, Sgt. Michael Swinton, and Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, and note that the names of our last fallen will be released when we can". He did not mention Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad by name and took it for “our last fallen”.
Secretary of Defense (War) Pete Hegseth did not mention any of the casualties or any names of the recently fallen service members in his opening remarks. Hegseth omitted them entirely from his initial presentation. Not one service members name. However, he did speak generally about the service members' sacrifices later in the hearing during a combative exchange with lawmakers.
Senator Gary Peters pressed Hegseth on the strategic direction of the conflict, noting that American service personnel are "still dying". In response Hegseth defended the administration's policy by asserting that calling the war a failure just "smears the sacrifice of our warfighters our warriors..to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
Senator Gary Peters did not say any military personnel were failures. The Senator said Hegseth was the failure to place the military members lives in danger due “his incompetence”.
The publication Stars and Stripes confirmed that Hegseth never mentioned the names of the individual service members killed over the weekend during the entire 3-hour and 45-minute session.
https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-07-21/caine-hegseth-senate-hearing-iran-war-22330260.html
There is no doubt that this war is an absolute clusterf*€k.. There was never a plan. That both Hegseth and that Felon have not a clue as to what the Hell they are doing. They both fit “Prior proper planning prevents piss-poor performance” — is a saying that originated as a British Army slang adage in the mid-20th century and quickly spread to the United States military, aviation, and even in professional management circles. The Felon and Hegseth are both the “piss-poor performance”.
They clearly do not give a shit about any member of the military. When Hegseth keeps calling them all “warfighters” or “warriors in the profession of arms" it’s grotesque. It’s labeling all our people in the military as if they are a NPC (Non-Player Character) in a video game.
Have two grandchildren in the service and spoke recently to them both at the same time on FaceTime. This was before the escalation of the bombings starting up again. One is in the Navy, the other in the Air Force. They are both in their 20’s. Can see the worry lines creeping upon their faces, the fatigue and weariness in their voices. Like most grandchildren though, they talk about the good and great things that are happening in their lives that they want to share. One day they will be home along with all their fellow compadres.
My grandchildren like so many other families who have loved ones serving in the military are NOT a Non-Player Character in a video game….
Have said it before — Democracy is not a spectator event, never has been…. Voting has Consequences..
Just to help you avoid criticism …quickly double check your commentary on the bar graph. If I’m not mistaken … the red/blue bars represent deaths/length of war not Other Presidents/trump. Thank you for your hard work. 👏🏼