🚨 Trump Got US Troops Killed

The president doesn’t even seem like he’s pretending to care about dead US soldiers, plus the Pentagon quietly admits Iran wasn’t going to attack the US.

On this day in 2002, the US launched its first major ground assault in Afghanistan. This week is a stark reminder of how US military deployments have somehow found ways to grow dumber and more maddening over the last two and a half decades. Thanks for that, Donald the Dove.

Hi, it’s Swin again. I don’t have anything clever to say in this intro. Every month, Donald Trump and his party find new ways to expand their numerous unjustified, lethal wars (both abroad and right here at home), and there aren’t very many polite words left to use in chronicling the upsurge in bloodbaths. I will, however, try my best, starting now.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ President Trump is getting a ton of people, including US military personnel, killed and doesn’t seem to give a shit, he may have bit off more than he expected by taking out Iran’s leader, and judges in deep-red West Virginia are warning about ICE’s lawlessness at home. Plus, we bring you the latest from the US and Israel’s illegal war with Iran.

‘He Doesn’t Do Empathy’

Trump on March 1, 2026. Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images.

The blood of American soldiers is on his hands, even as the entirety of the Republican Party elite will try to wash it off with their scolding talking points. This was true when troops got shot in Washington, DC, last year – troops who never should have been there and were in DC only because Donald Trump wanted a power grab in our nation’s capital.

It is truer today as American families mourn the latest round of fallen soldiers who did not have to die, and are only dead today because of the Trump-Vance administration and its bottomless appetite for wars that never had to happen and that a staggering majority of Americans openly do not want.

So far, Trump’s regime-change blitz on Iran – a war of aggression for which there is no clear mission whatsoever – has gotten hundreds of Iranians, including scores of schoolgirls, killed in addition to four US troops killed and several others wounded, according to initial reports on Iranian retaliation. The US president is attempting to front-run future stories of dead American soldiers being flown home to grieving loved ones, and issued a video address telling the American public that “there will likely be more” of these deaths in the “righteous” war that he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have plunged us into.

I highly encourage each of you to watch the fuller video from Trump. It is genuinely chilling. At one point, it looks like the guy starts to smirk when talking about how likely it is that the American body count will further increase.

“Sadly, there will likely be more before it ends,” the president says. “That’s the way it is.”

Elsewhere, Trump told the New York Times on Sunday, “Three is three too many as far as I’m concerned. If you look at projections, they do projections, it could be quite a bit higher than that.” He added, “We expect casualties.”

Too often, it feels as though we are living in a Paul Verhoeven movie, where a mentally declining, physically deteriorating reality-TV-show personality turned wannabe god emperor is doing a full court press to convince you to feel grateful for the mass death and American casualties he’s causing.

Trump and the horrendous gang running our federal government are barely even trying to pretend that they care about the soldiers they’ve needlessly sent to their deaths, and the other service members who they think they’ll be sending to die tomorrow.

Over the weekend, I reached out to various Trump advisers, past and present, to ask them why this president often seems so callous when officially addressing the killing of his fellow countrymen and compatriots. Some got defensive. Others retained a modicum of self-awareness, including a senior administration official who told me: “He doesn’t do empathy.”