Crime pays. That has always been Trump’s motto. Crimes have victims, and the question this country faces every day is, when will enough of Trump’s victims in this country be mad enough to fight back?
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
Tomorrow, two of Donald Trump’s loyal underlings, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, will get on an airplane owned by the U.S. government and fly to Moscow to meet with an accused war criminal, Vladimir Putin, allegedly to negotiate some sort of deal to end Russia’s war on Ukraine. What sort of deal will they talk about with Putin? Well, as the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, “borders matter less than business” when it comes to dealing with Russia and Ukraine. As long as everyone gets rich, very much including their master, Donald Trump, the details, including hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, entire Ukrainian cities including hospitals and churches in rubble, don’t matter. Trump doesn’t care if the color of money is red, so long as the right percentage of blood money ends up in his pocket.
Nor does it matter to Donald Trump how his war is fought against drug trafficking in the Caribbean and Pacific seas. On September 2, at the very beginning of the Navy’s strikes on alleged “drug boats,” Pete “secretary of whatever” Hegseth ordered Seal Team Six to “kill everybody” who survived an airstrike on a boat off the coast of the Caribbean island of Trinidad. A second missile strike was ordered. The two survivors, who had been clinging to the wreckage of their boat, were “blown apart in the water,” according to the Washington Post.
Let me describe to you where Hegseth was when he ordered the deaths of these two men: He was in his office at the Pentagon, nowhere near the alleged “drug boat,” nowhere near whatever was left of it after the first missile hit, nowhere near the blood that flowed into the water when the two men were hit by the second missile. Hegseth’s office is on the third floor of the Pentagon overlooking the Potomac River, with a view of the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. The office has its own express elevator that goes straight to the basement parking garage, making no stops on other floors.
Outside the office, the third-floor hallway is lined with photographs of previous secretaries of defense and chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff. Shortly after taking office, Hegseth ordered that photos of General Mark Milley and former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper be removed. The same day, he ordered that the security clearances of the two men be revoked. Hegseth understands erasure. He does not understand killing. That is why he has ordered the missile strikes on the so-called “drug boats,” without any evidence that the boats are carrying drugs or manned by drug dealers.
Hegseth’s order, which has been variously quoted as “kill them all” or “kill everybody,” is such an extreme departure from military doctrine and law that two Congressional committees, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, have announced “inquiries” and a “full accounting” of the circumstances of the operation ordered by Hegseth that killed the two survivors of the missile attack on the boat in the Caribbean.
Hegseth does not have much to worry about. Although airstrikes on unidentified and undefended boats from a country we are not at war with may be a war crime, Donald Trump will pardon him if he should ever face charges.
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Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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