Photo by Sebastian Enrique
“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.”
– President Donald J. Trump, May 2026
Trump is Melania without the olive-green Zara jacket[1]: He cares about nothing. When asked about rising gas prices in March, he responded, “If they rise, they rise. I don’t have any concern about it.” Asked about the suspension of “peace” talks with Iran in June, he said, “I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less.” In December 2025, at a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he stated that “I’m not concerned about anything that Israel is doing” in Gaza. On May 27th, he announced, “I don’t care about the midterms.” Trump’s promiscuous indifference is exceeded only by the pathological know-nothingism he deploys to evade responsibility for his crimes.
What Trump does care about is personal aggrandizement. He cannot refrain from talking about his ballroom, his triumphal arch, his reflecting “pond,” his delusional “extreme intelligence,” and ultimately himself. In his own eyes, he sees himself as a master builder – after all, it’s in his genes, an expression of his “stable genius.” A deluded modern-day Ramesses II, he erects monuments to himself, plastering his face and name everywhere, from the Kennedy Center to $1 coins and $250 commemorative bills. In his second term, Trump’s scowling face now drapes down from banners on three federal buildings (Labor, Justice, and Agriculture) that represent institutions degraded in his wake. His face will soon adorn “limited-edition” U.S. passports, though, to borrow Mr. T’s favorite phrase, one pities the fool who applies for one and advertises their idolatry – and idiocy – to the world for the next ten years. Then again, if the SAVE Act passes, possessing one may be a strategic move on their part to ensure that, come November, they are not disenfranchised at the midterms, assuming, of course, there are any.
Trump’s indifference and the destruction it has wrought is criminal in scope. He does not care that his policies, including the dismantling of USAID and the closure of the CDC’s advisory committee on infectious diseases will result in tens of millions of deaths worldwide, and perhaps usher in another pandemic during which our know-it-all president once again recommends bleach as a cure.
What is more tragic is that we have let Trump’s self-professed indifference go as far as it has while we try to pinpoint its cause. However, whether Trump is insane, the paranoid Captain Queeg of our Ship of State, a demented narcissist, or simply incompetent is a determination best left to mental health experts, hundreds of whom have already signed petitions alerting us to his mental instability.
Whatever his mental state, we know with certainty that he is an adjudicated criminal. He has broken, and continues to break, the law – both in and out of office – without facing any real consequences for his transgressions, which include sexual assault, 34 felonies, possible war crimes in Venezuela and Iran, and complicity in Israeli’s war crimes and genocide in Gaza. Whether these actions see him confined to a psychiatric facility or a federal prison is beside the point. Whatever the ultimate site of his confinement, he must be held accountable, something those who operate within the system refuse to do.
Even more disturbing Trump’s behavior has exposed the systemic indifference that defines our republic – an indifference to corruption historically obscured by a national hagiography that existed long before he took office, twice. It is the same indifference that allowed Harry S. Truman to nuke Japan, not once but twice (possibly serving as a precedent for Trump’s genocidal threats against Iran), that shrugged off George W. Bush’s crusade against Iraq and Afghanistan, that turned a blind eye to Obama’s drone strikes, and that ensured that virtually none of the Wall Street executives responsible for the 2008 financial crisis spent a single night in prison. The result: a kind of fait accompli fatalism in which the Department of Justice can argue that Trump can tear down the East Wing – and the Statue of Liberty – on a whim and the courts cannot stop him. Is it too hyperbolic to suggest he can rip up the Constitution and flush it down his apocryphal golden Mar-a-Lago toilet as well, similar immunity? Is it too cynical to suggest he already has?
This is the cost of our indifference – and impotence, a price paid in ravaged national symbols, wasted tax dollars, and, increasingly, shattered lives both at home and abroad:
+ the 17 million Americans kicked off health insurance because of cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act
+ the 4.3 million Americans kicked off food stamps.
+ the over 200 fishermen killed in U.S. airstrikes in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean
+ the 175 victims of the U.S. attack on Iran’s Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School and others killed in America’s latest optional war
+ the estimated 762,000 people who have died since Trump cut USAID funding
+ the 51 detainees who have died in ICE custody
+ the roughly 23,000 Palestinians killed since Trump returned to office.[2]
Trump insisted that Mexico would pay for the Wall; that his $400 million Qatar-gifted jet would cost taxpayers nothing, conveniently omitting the fact that it will cost billions to install security upgrades; that the East Wing would remain untouched during the construction of his drone-topped ballroom-bunker, a bill he also promised taxpayers would not have to foot; that Iran is hell-bent on producing a nuclear weapon, despite the fact that, according to the 2024 U.S. Intelligence Community Annual Threat Assessment, Iran “is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.” These are all demonstrable lies, easily Googled.
The cherished golden calf of the Guardians of Pedophiles (GOP), as this “Dumocrat” chooses to label the party of their gilded savior, campaigned to release all the Epstein files, only to stall once he returned to the Oval Office. The “no more forever wars,” America First candidate now wages fatal “excursions” into Iran, as he continues to threaten more deadly junkets to Mexico, Cuba, Greenland, and Denmark.
In the end, the question is less about Trump’s concern – or lack thereof – than about the focus of our own and those who ostensibly represent us. Representatives on both sides of the aisle and its center have failed to challenge Trump in any meaningful way. This paralysis reduces whatever objections they do express to little more than rhetorical flourishes, empty gestures of political Kabuki. Trump and his enablers simply ignore restrictions placed on them, filibustering, gaslighting, and lying their way through congressional hearings with impunity, perjurers with portfolios.
Our much-lauded “coequal branches” of government offer no protection when one of them ceases to exercise its power and instead passively submits to coercion from the other two. What good is an Emolument Clause, a 25th Amendment, or the War Powers Act when those entrusted with enforcing them refuse to act?
At what point does a hallowed democracy become a hollow dumocracy, a degraded and deplorable form of political governance in which not only the “b” is silent, but also the people who, against their own self-interest, allow themselves to be exploited by an oligarchy of billionaire – and potentially trillionaire – kleptocrats? If our democracy were functioning, Republicans would be worried that the excesses of their self-styled fuehrer might result in electoral defeat and fear of being swept away by the proverbial Blue Wave. Yet despite the party’s tanking approval ratings, they appear remarkably indifferent, perhaps because the Supreme Court embraces partisan redistricting and has eviscerated the Voting Rights Act. Meanwhile, new ICE recruits are ready to “stand back and stand by.”
It is not as if no one saw this coming. As early as 1935, Sinclair Lewis, in It Can’t Happen Here, warned that, left unchecked, fascism could take root in the United States. Fletcher Knebel’s 1965 political thriller Night of Camp Davidwarned readers about the dangers of an insane president. Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone delivered dire cautionary tales about the “monsters on Maple Street” – middle Americans united in their fear of the Other – and nightmarish but prescient visions of future authoritarian Americas ruled by strongmen metaphorically modeled on Hitler and Stalin. But these tales were confined to the printed page or presented in black-and-white, underscored by ominous music and concluded with Serling’s somber, tight-lipped, Cassandra-like, warnings.
In contrast, Trump’s all-too-real transgressions are televised daily in living color, a Bizarro World reality show, with “Y.M.C.A.,” not Bernard Herrmann, blaring in the background. His self-promoting cabinet meetings resemble nationally syndicated episodes of The Apprentice, with its members, the Worst and the Dimmest, competing to fellate Trump’s tumescent ego until he climaxes and falls asleep, though they deny it or claim not to notice. Meanwhile, he fires those who arouse his wrath – not for incompetence or malfeasance, but for insufficient displays of loyalty. Their replacements rise like cream to the level of their own limitless incompetence, a white-supremacist’s DEI that rewards dysfunction, extremism, and illegality with cabinet positions.
If ancient Rome promised the masses bread and circuses, Trump’s fragile empire – where all roads lead to the Donald – offers only the latter: a $60 million cage-match extravaganza whose security costs – estimated to run an additional $6.4 to $30 million – will be paid by taxpayers who are already struggling to afford the bread, both literally and figuratively, that occupies the other half of the classical equation, bread made even more expensive by policies whose financial impact on the American people, by his own cavalier admission, he couldn’t care less about.
The canceled Freedom 250 Concert Series[3] – another boondoggle projected to cost taxpayers upward of $100 million – has been repurposed into yet another Trump MAGA-style rally where, according to conservative Joe Walsh, he will rant for 90 minutes, no doubt incoherently “weaving” far and wide about election fraud, windmills, fortified ballrooms, “whiny” trans athletes, handsome, young white men with rock-hard muscles, well-equipt Arnold Palmer look-a-likes, “low-IQ” black[4] female journalists, and his unparalleled ability to identify animals and to label female journalists “piggy.” The withdrawal of performers who claim they were misled may look like a victory of praxis over inertia, suggesting that the sheep have finally looked up and the shepherd has been put in his place, until one realizes we simply must await yet another self-promotional, grievance-filled public spectacle. Left unanswered: What happens to the millions allocated for the canceled concert?
Here again, we have learned nothing. In 2025, Trump used the birthday of the U.S. Army to piggyback a military parade, complete with creaking tanks and predictably sparse crowds, to celebrate his own. A year later, he employs the same tactic to attach his birthday to celebrations of the nation’s founding. When Trump said that the Triumphal Arch he plans to build is for himself, he was not joking.
Maya Angelou famously said that when someone shows you who they are, believe them. Trump has shown us, through his vindictiveness, indifference, and spectacle who he is. And many Americans, especially his MAGA supporters, are finally beginning to see the wizard behind the curtain.
To be fair, it is not that there has been no resistance but that it has been largely, and alarmingly, ineffective. The “No Kings” protests (the next scheduled for June 14th) have only vented national frustration not toppled the regime. Trump’s meritless lawsuits have collapsed, yet the judgements against him are ignored or inconsistently enforced.[5] Even the so-called MAGA civil war appears less a rejection of demagoguery than a search for a more “reasonable” and palatable demagogue. Tucker Carlson 2028? Thomas Massie? Tulsi Gabbard? Meanwhile, actions that might prove more impactful – Haymarket-scale general strikes, a coordinated tax boycott – are nowhere in sight. Organized opposition did, of course, prompt ABC to return Jimmy Kimmel to its airwaves. But Kimmel’s suggestion that viewers permanently boycott CBS and its subsidiaries and affiliates following the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show apparently had no legs, a failure that has only encouraged the network to go after 60 Minutes, another venerable institution on the brink of collapse as veterans of the program resign, are fired and replaced by MAGA-aligned Borg. “Resistance is futile,” or so they would have us believe.
“First they came for the late-night talk shows, and I did nothing; then they came for independent media…” You know the drill.
The question remains: what can we do when the institutions that theoretically exist to serve us no longer function, when the president wraps himself around the flag even as he violates the very norms it represents.
Perhaps, during the Freedom 250 celebration, Trump will don a Zara jacket of his own – golden, of course – not one that declares “I really don’t care,” but one that makes his message of disdain unmistakable. After all, this is the same man-child who has accused Obama and Biden of turning the White House into a “shithouse,” a word choice that speaks volumes about how little he cares about the country, its sensibilities, and its institutions.
Notes
[1] According to Vanity Fair, the message scrawled on the back of Melania’s jacket was meant as a middle finger to Ivanka Trump, which raises the question of whether Trump’s demolition of the East Wing – traditionally the province of First Ladies – was itself payback against Melania over her long-standing feud with the First Daughter. Yet, whatever the hidden motive, little ambiguity surrounds the true targets of Trump’s indifference: democracy, the rule of law, and the American people, with the notable exception, of course, of the “poorly educated,” whom he notoriously professes to “love” – and whose gutting of the Department of Education appears strategically designed to expand their ranks since much of his support derives from less educated white voters.
[2] The estimate is calculated by subtracting the last confirmed Gaza Ministry of Health total before January 20, 2025 (49,090 deaths as of January 5, 2025) from the next reported cumulative total (72,063 deaths as of February 16, 2026) The difference (22,973) represents the minimum number of additional deaths recorded during that period. Of course, indifference to the deaths of Palestinians at the hands of Israelis after did not begin with the Trump regime over 49,000 were slaughtered after October 7, 2023, a conservative estimate at best as it does not include thousands of unrecovered bodies still buried in the rubble.
[3] Two commemorative events marking America’s 250th anniversary are planned: America 250, sponsored by Congress, and the Trump-backed Freedom 250. Congress has earmarked roughly $150 million for America 250, a portion of which may be redirected to Freedom 250.
[4] I have chosen not to capitalize “black” until there is substantive reform of American police enforcement and the criminal justice system that results in the criminal prosecution of those who use excessive force and a systemic, long-term reduction in the number of police killings and brutalization of black people.
[5] A federal judge has temporarily blocked Trump’s “anti-weaponization” slush fund that would have compensated his insurrectionist loyalist. However, should it be revived, arguably its resources might better be directed toward the real victims of governmental overreach: the hundreds of millions of Americans whose social security and other sensitive personal information was improperly accessed by the liminal, on-again, off-again and seminal DOGE head Elon Musk and his 20-year-old minion Edward “Big Balls” Coristine. In fact, several lawsuits have been brought against DOGE. And while the plaintiffs may ultimately win or settle their cases, in keeping with a multi-tiered American legal system in which Justice sneaks peeks from behind her blindfold and the rule of law is weighed on the scales of race and income, the Supreme Court, has ensured that Trump’s presidential immunity protects him from federal prosecution – at least so long as he remains in office. Still, the fact that mere mortals like Musk and Coristine have not been provided such an out may provide some comfort.