Trump Tries to Erase the Casualties of His War
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
MAGA may be rallying behind Andrew and Tristan Tate, but the White House isn’t interested in spending political capital on protecting the manosphere sex pests from rape charges in the UK. Asked yesterday whether the White House would block the brothers’ extradition, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was terse: “No. We’ve already answered that question.”
Some housekeeping: You may have noticed that Morning Shots looks a little different today. This is part of a wider refresh for The Bulwark that we’re excited to share with you today. We hope you like what you see, but as with all home renovations, there’s always a punch list. Happy Friday.
Join JVL and special guest Paul Krugman for Receipts Live at 12:30 p.m. EDT today on Substack and YouTube.
Cancel Culture at the Pentagon
by William Kristol
1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Hawaii.
Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Texas.
Sgt. Angel Rampersad, 28, of New York.
Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, of North Carolina.
These soldiers died in the past week in the war against Iran. Lt. Feehan, Sgt. Rampersad, and Pvt. Gonzales were killed by an Iranian ballistic missile attack in Jordan. Sgt. Swinton died as a result of the demolition of an Iranian drone in Iraq. Their service to our nation should be honored. It certainly should not be erased.
But Donald Trump’s Defense Department has tried to erase these four service members from its official list of Iran war casualties.
As the New York Times reported last night, on Wednesday, the Pentagon’s casualties website listed eighteen service members who had been killed during the war with Iran. By Thursday, the Defense Department had lowered that number to fourteen—apparently excluding Lt. Feehan, Pvt. Gonzales, Sgt. Rampersand, and Sgt. Swinton.
Three military officials told the Times that “one reason behind the change was that the Trump administration decided to remove four service members killed this past weekend from the list—three in Jordan and one in northern Iraq—because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April.”
Trump’s Defense Department responded to the Times report on Thursday evening by claiming that the change was due to “temporary data disruptions” and that “these site anomalies are currently being resolved in coordination with the Military Services.”
But as I write on Friday morning, the “anomalies” haven’t been “resolved.” The Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System website still lists only fourteen deaths as a result of the Iran conflict—even though the Pentagon’s press release earlier in the week in connection with the dignified transfer of the four soldiers’ remains stated, “The deaths are related to Iranian aggression.”
But the administration, from the president on down, has been preoccupied with trying to downplay the costs of Trump’s war. The president has been regularly posting and talking about how many fewer casualties there have been compared to prior conflicts. And he has gone out of his way to call the war an “excursion” or a “skirmish.”
And the administration does have a particular interest in pretending these latest deaths aren’t somehow part of the Iran war. At his appearance Tuesday before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Hegseth was once again challenged about the lack of congressional authorization for the war. Then on Thursday, there were votes in both the House and Senate on war powers resolutions. One of many disingenuous arguments the Trump administration made to try to beat back demands for congressional authorization was that the clock for requiring congressional approval should restart after pauses in the war. The claim that these four soldiers’ deaths can’t be attributed to Trump’s Operation Epic Fury because they happened after the collapse of the ceasefire is part of the effort to avoid congressional accountability.
But it is also, of course, part of a broader phenomenon. As retired Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges told the Times, “The administration seems to have a real hard time being honest about what is going on—not just about casualties, but about the whole war in general.” And about much else besides.
The erasure of the deaths of Lt. Feehan, Pvt. Gonzales, Sgt. Rampersand, and Sgt. Swinton is only one of many, many instances of the dishonesty of the Trump administration—though it’s an extraordinarily petty and a strikingly callous one. It goes without saying that the administration’s dishonesty cannot diminish the honor due to these soldiers. But it does stain the honor of our country.
Do We Have a Deal?
by Andrew Egger
On Wednesday, the landmark nuclear agreement permitting Saudi Arabia to develop a civilian nuclear program with American uranium looked like a done deal: agreed to, signed, and announced with great fanfare by both nations. One day later, Trump threw the whole thing into confusion with—what else?—a post on Truth Social. The deal, he now said, would be “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords.” In other words: No deal unless Saudi Arabia agrees to diplomatically recognize Israel. Why sandbag the Saudis with this extra demand after the agreement was signed, rather than as part of the negotiating process? Who knows? Art of the deal, baby!
Whatever the reason, the White House insists—for now—that Trump’s eleventh-hour concern is official U.S. policy. What U.S. negotiators said until now matters little, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters yesterday: Trump alone is the “final dealmaker.” “If they don’t join the Abraham Accords,” Leavitt said, “the deal is off.”
What happens next is far from clear. The Saudis have not publicly tipped their hand, although one Saudi source suggested to veteran foreign policy reporter Laura Rozen that they may try to stare Trump down: A deal “was signed, so nothing to renegotiate,” the source said. “Tweets don’t overturn signed agreements.” (I’m sorry: Have they met this guy?)
Trump has never been shy during his presidency about ripping up other people’s deals—NAFTA, say, or the JCPOA. Lately, though, the deals he’s ripping up have been his own. The same thing happened last month with Iran: The ink was barely dry on the memorandum of understanding before he was assuring his hawkish critics that the U.S. would hold Iran to stricter concessions than Iran had actually agreed to. It didn’t matter that Iran hadn’t agreed to permanently dismantle its nuclear program, Trump insisted: “If it’s not, we will bomb them. . . . We’re going to bomb the hell out of you.”
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, exactly. Dating all the way back to his pre-political business career, Trump has never seen his word as his bond; contracts and agreements, to him, aren’t so much mutually binding pledges as momentary branding exercises intended to get a little leverage. An ordinary negotiator gets the best deal he can, then goes home and tries to sell the deal to the public; Trump, by contrast, is willing to jettison whole portions of any deal he strikes if he senses it would make the selling-to-the-public bit easier. If the other party objects, well, that’s their problem.
This is a terrible characteristic in anybody, of course—nobody wants partners in life, in business, or in politics that can’t be trusted even to try to abide by their commitments. But in a would-be American emperor, it’s ruinous. Trump wants the entire world to run on his IOUs. When he’s gone, will there be a single country left that hasn’t learned a hard lesson about trusting the United States again?
AROUND THE BULWARK
A High-Stakes Primary in Wisconsin’s Race for Governor… Will the Democrat who wins the party’s gubernatorial nomination August 11 be too progressive to beat a sycophantic Trump crony? BILL LUEDERS reports.
Against Heteropessimism… Accounting for the nature of straight women’s desire is hard. CLARE COFFEY writes: What to do about it?
The DSA is a Gift to MAGA... MONA CHAREN on the socialists vs. the Democrats.
The Trump Administration Is on a Legal Losing Streak… On Bulwark Takes, SAM STEIN and BEN PARKER give their takes on why the DOJ abruptly withdrew its subpoenas against three New York Times reporters and their family members over reporting on security flaws in Trump’s Qatari-gifted Air Force One.
Which Directors Have the Most Hollywood Juice? NATE JONES joins SONNY BUNCH to discuss who are the hundred most powerful directors in Hollywood, and Sonny reviews Motor City.
Quick Hits
FUN WITH TARIFFS: Ever since the Supreme Court overturned his “Liberation Day” tariffs back in February, Donald Trump has been trying to keep his protectionist trade regime with the legal equivalents of duct tape and-chewing gum. One temporary authority expired last night at midnight; accordingly, he issued a new set of tariffs on a new authority to go into effect against more than eighty countries at 12:01 a.m. today. Here’s the New York Times:
The duties were issued under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows the president to impose tariffs on foreign countries that engage in unreasonable or discriminatory trade practices. The administration has cited the failure of foreign countries to pass or enforce laws banning the importation of goods made by forced labor into their own countries, saying that disadvantages U.S. businesses that do follow such laws.
Canada, which is subject to a 10 percent tariff under the arrangement, already prohibits importing forced labor goods. The European Union, also at 10 percent, has a ban that is scheduled to take effect in December 2027. But Trump officials say that the governments have not effectively enforced those laws.
Obviously, these are invented post-hoc rationalizations: Trump and his team are merely saying they care about forced labor because forced-labor concerns are what you need to have to unlock this particular tariff authority. One weird trick to running the government more or less by fiat is you can just lie about things!
EVERYBODY’S WHIPPING BOYS: They’re not the most sympathetic group in the world, but there’s a certain pathos to the plight of Senate Republicans right now—the group Trump has spent his disappointing second year back in office scapegoating for the paralysis of his domestic agenda. “I’ve never seen people so mad,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) said this week on 13th and Park, the podcast of top D.C. lobby shop Ballard Partners (yes, they have a podcast). “The job of the national media, what they try to do is make my parents mad. They sit at home and they watch Fox News and Newsmax, and guess what? They’re mad at me, they’re mad at John Thune, they’re mad at Mitch McConnell.”
“I mean, like, there’s this purity test,” Marshall went on. “So I feel this anger. More than ever before.”
It’s not every day a sitting Republican senator openly airs his frustration with Fox News. But the strain on the larger GOP apparatus is getting harder to ignore. After White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt castigated Senate Republicans for failing to pass the SAVE America Act yesterday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune quipped to reporters: “She or somebody else ought to get on the phone and get the votes, right?”
“Instead of pointing the finger at Republicans, they might think about going after the people who are stopping it on the floor, which is the Democrats,” Thune added. “And if there are Republicans that they think are gettable, get on the phone. Let’s get them to yes.”
SHUT UP, MOMS: Brandon Herrera, the Texas gun-nut YouTuber and GOP congressional nominee, has a long history of ludicrous loudmouth takes. But none have raised more eyebrows than a clip that resurfaced this week of Herrera offering an extraordinarily vulgar reaction to the gun-control group Moms Demand Action—and by extension on moms participating in political discourse at all. (Seriously, it’s gross—don’t say we didn’t warn you.)
“Just because you let somebody creampie you doesn’t mean I have to give a shit about your political opinions,” Herrera said in the clip, cocking an eyebrow in front of a wall of guns. “The fact that you kept your cum trophy doesn’t make you any less wrong about the dumb shit that you say.”
It’s not exactly news that America’s political realignment has left some very strange social-policy bedfellows in the Republican tent—after all, the coalition purporting to stand up for traditional values, morality, religion, and Western civilization has been helmed for a decade by a faithless philanderer and pathological liar who’s never opened a book in his life.
But those contradictions are only growing stronger and stranger as the GOP imports a new coalition of young men that are disproportionately nihilistic, terminally online edgelords. Is the GOP a party that prizes motherhood as a high calling, as so many old-school social conservatives suggest? Or is it one that sneers off mothers who dare participate in the political process as people who just “kept their cum trophies”? Apparently, it’s both!
Cheap Shots
"The erasure of the deaths of Lt. Feehan, Pvt. Gonzales, Sgt. Rampersand, and Sgt. Swinton is only one of many, many instances of the dishonesty of the Trump administration..."
Why bother telling the truth when their voters can't tell the difference?
It was before my time, but when General Westmoreland was lying about how things were going in Vietnam, once people found out he was lying, I'm pretty sure the American people were irate about it. I'm sure there are folks here who know much more about that history than I. But we are seeing this administration lie every time it says anything about the war; their broad silence on the war is punctuated by occasional lies. They cannot say an honest thing in general, and that certainly goes for any time they speak about this conflict. But this shameless and copious dishonesty is met by the public with a shrug, and accountability is not only absent, but unimaginable.
We are a very different country than we were in the Vietnam era, and in many ways worse. At that time, we expected politicians to be honest, and when they weren't, there would be some consequences. There might even be condemnations from partisans on the same side. There were protests, major protests, over Vietnam and the lies we were fed. A president was impeached and resigned to avoid conviction, because Americans and politicians had some baseline expectation of acceptable behavior and this could even occasionally transcend partisan allegiances. The Republican Party and Donald Trump have ruined this country, to the point where corruption is not only tolerated but tenaciously defended, and accountability is inconceivable. This is a path to ruin, if we've not already reached that destination.