Trump Golfs While Empire Burns: Iran War, Gaza Genocide, Impunity Machine
President Donald Trump was spotted at his golf courses in Bedminster, New Jersey on Saturday as his deeply unpopular war against Iran claimed the lives of two U.S. service members just hours earlier, The Daily Beast reported. It was not clear if he had already been informed of the deaths. The commander-in-chief on the links while his war machine grinds up working-class recruits: the hierarchy of sacrifice could not be starker.
That same weekend, a top Trump official faced exposure for abuse of tax-funded privileges, a scandal the D.C. insiders at Pod Save America called the perfect example of "how to lose a presidential election." The looting of public resources proceeds in plain sight, the cost borne by taxpayers while the administration wages war abroad.
Overseas, Israel attacked a funeral in Gaza as it escalated strikes, continuing what Zeteo describes as genocidal war and apartheid policies. Mourners become targets; the siege tightens. When the Freedom Flotilla Coalition attempted to break the siege by sea, activists were kidnapped by the IOF, including maritime activist and filmmaker Seungjoon Lee. Maritime direct action met with state piracy: kidnapping in international waters, impunity guaranteed by the patron in Washington.
The Intercept frames the pattern as continuity: "Turning on our allies has always been the American way." Betrayal is not aberration but policy — from Kurdish fighters to Palestinian civilians, from service members sent to die for imperial ambition to taxpayers fleeced for official perks.
Domestically, the machinery of repression advances. A reinvigorated COINTELPRO for the 2020s deploys police drones and AI-assisted mass surveillance, targeting organizers who threaten capital's grip. Indian workers are resisting efforts to train their AI robot replacements, offering lessons for disrupting surveillance capitalism everywhere. The ultra-rich pour unprecedented sums into state politics to block a proposed billionaire tax and advance a tech-friendly agenda.
Climate collapse fuels the same logic. Out-of-control Canadian wildfires prompt calls for "Nuremberg trials for big oil" as fossil fuel arsonists burn the planet for profit. Trump responds by threatening tariffs on Canada for the smoke, weaponizing ecological catastrophe for nationalist posturing.
The dead include two service members killed in Iran, mourners struck at a Gaza funeral, flotilla activists seized by the IOF, and workers everywhere whose labor funds the privileges exposed by Pod Save America. The looting of public funds, the waging of imperial war, the enforcement of siege, the kidnapping of resisters, the surveillance of dissidents — these are not separate scandals. They are the integrated machinery of empire, operated by and for capital.